/ 



THE 



CrEATOE and the CrEATUEE ; 



OR, 



THE WONDERS OF DIVINE LOVE. 



I FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, D.D., 

* ^' 

^' AUTHOR OF "all FOR JESUS," "GROWTH IX HOLINESS," "BLESSED 

C SACRAMENT," ETC. ETC. 



'Ov yap irdpepyou Sei rroiuadai tuv Qeov. 

Pythagoras. 



litlj an Introbitttioit, bg mx %mzxkmx filcrggmau. 



With the Approbation of the Most Reverend Archbishop of Baltimore. 



^^>^ 



BALTIMORE: 

MURPHY & CO., 182 BALTIMORE STREET. 

18 57. 



t1 






Entered, according to Act of Confrress, in the year 1857, by 

JOHN MURPHY & Co., 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the District 

of Maryland. 






^f6 



TO 

ST. MATTHEW. 

THE APOSTLE AND EVANGELIST 

OF THE INCARNATE WORD, 

THE PATTERN OF OBEDIENCE TO DIVINE VOCATIONS, 

THE MODEL OF PROMPT SUBMISSION TO HOLY INSPIRATIONS, 

THE TEACHER AND THE EXAMPLE OF CORRESPONDENCE TO GRACE, 

WHO 
LEFT ALL FOR GOD, 

SELF AND THE WORLD AND WEALTH, 

AT GOD'S ONE WORD, 

WITHOUT QUESTION, WITHOUT RESERVE, WITHOUT DELAY, 
TO BE FOR EVER IN THE CHURCH 

THE DOCTOR, THE PROPHET, AND THE PATRON, 

THE COMFORT AND THE JUSTIFICATION 

OF THOSE WHO FOLLOW HEAVENLY CALLS IN THE WORLD'S DESPITE, 

AND WHO GIVE THEMSELVES IN LOVE, AS HE GAVE HIMSELF, 

WITHOUT LIMIT OR CONDITION, 

^» €:reature» to tjeir Creator. 



¥^' 



(iii) 



To EREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, D. D., 

Friest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.— London. 

Some Angel radiant with the light of heaven, 

And brighter far with Grod's eternal love 

Eor this sad world, where like the wearied dove 

The souls of men, 'mid storm and darkness driven 

O'er the wild waves of error, grief and sin, 

Would fain, once more, regain the Ark — and rest ! — 

Some Angel such as Mercy sends to win 

All hearts to Love, most surely was thy guest — 

Thy thoughts, thy words inspired : his fragrant wings 

In rapture wav'd o'er thee, and thy abode — 

Eriend of the weary heart in search of God! 

As 'mid life's glitt'ring waste, like joyous springs 

Thy Works came forth. — Men own the Treasure given : 

Bless Thee and God: — and journey on to Heaven. 

E. J. SomuN, S. J. 

Loyola College, Baltimore, May, 1857. , 

(iT) 



IntwkrfifiK to i^t %mmtm (BMm, 



" The English language and the Irish race are overrunning 
the world," says Dr. Newman, and that race, "pre-eminently 
Catholic, is at this very time, of all tribes of the earth, the most 
fertile in emigrants both to the West and the South." In the 
midst of the sixty millions who, it is computed, now speak the 
English language, and are daily extending their influence to 
every quarter of the world, a large and active portion is this 
same ''pre-eminently Catholic race." 

With these facts in our mind, we turn to this last work of the 
Rev. Dr. Faber, with sentiments of gratitude to heaven, and 
hope for its abundant blessing on the teachings of such a guide, 
which our most earnest language would but faintly express. 
If the power to conceive and convey to others the sublime, 
and at the same time, the most practical truths that can inte- 
rest the human mind, be a title to the homage of men, then has 
Father Faber established for himself a claim which no length 
of years nor change of circumstances can efface. If, together 
with this power, there is joined the grace of awakening the 
purest, the holiest emotions of which the human heart is capa- 
ble, who can withhold the homage due to such a servant of the 
Church ? It may be excess of admiration for genius, learning, 
wisdom, zeal, pietj^, all combined in one noble soul ; or is it 
the depth of our gratitude to the Father of mercies and the God 
of all consolation, from whom every good and perfect gift de- 
scendeth that sways our judgment when we say that not for 
several ages past has God given to his Church a teacher, whose 
thoughts of love and words of light will fall, like heaven's dew, 
on a wider extent of that field in which, with His prophets and 
apostles around Him, the Son of God Himself labored, and still 
labors for the salvation of souls? We do not forget that not 
more widely does star differ from star in glory, than do the 
minds of men, in their habits of thought, in their capacity of 
judgment and feeling. But, nevertheless, with this in view, we 
believe and only give utterance to what many will confirm as 
their conviction also, that since the days of St. Francis de 

A 2 (v) 



VI INTRODUCTION TO THE 

Sales, few writers have made more Christian hearts bow in 
loving adoration before our tabernacles than the author of **AIl 
for Jesus," and " The Blessed Sacrament." The wide ocean is 
between our homes. It is more than probable that we shall 
never meet. Yet who can estimate the salutary influence exer- 
cised in our country over a multitude of souls, from the clois- 
tered nun, with her group of gay, young worldlings around her, 
to the aged missionary, with his humble flock, by these two 
wonderful books. No one questions it. It may sound to some 
like adulation, but still we say that, in the treatise now before 
us, as well as in the three works that have preceded it, and 
made the name of Father Faber dear to myriads, there are 
chapters which re-echo in our day the sweetness of St. Bernard, 
the wit and erudition of St. Jerome, the eloquence of St. John 
Chrysostom, the philosophy of St. Augustine. The harp is the 
same, but it is, indeed, the hand of a master, whose soul is 
filled with the spirit of God, that awakens its chords. 

Although so distinct in character, that each is a treasury by 
itself, there is a unity of thought and design in all Dr. Faber's 
works. To us, it is the " Deus amans Animas !" — '* The God 
WHO LOVETH SOULS," that is everywhere, with adoring thank- 
fulness, ofi'ered to the contemplation not only of the great mass 
of believers, but of all mankind. This is the fountain-idea, 
whence have flowed, like the four rivers that went forth from 
the garden of Paradise, these four streams of learning, piety, 
sacred eloquence, and heavenly truth, for the refreshment and the 
healing of our age. Above all his divine attributes and works, 
it is the "love of Jesus Christ for the Church — the love of God 
for man," that everywhere, like sun-light on the waters, meets 
our sight. Not only in this last, but throughout his other pro- 
ductions, the ''wonders of divine love" are perpetually pre- 
senting themselves to the devout mind. 

If we may be allowed to change a httle our imagery, we 
would say " All for Jesus" was a sun-beam, suddenly lighting 
up with its warm, cheerful radiance, the road we are travelling, 
and imparting an unwonted beauty to every old, familiar object 
in the landscape around us. Who has not felt the joy-inspiring 
influence of such a moment? Something analogous to this, in 
the spiritual world, on the long, dusty, and to how many! 



AMERICAN EDITION. Vli 

wearisome road of life, it was intended **A11 for Jesus" should 
produce. And how must it cheer every hour, soothe every 
suffering of our beloved Father Faber — for this, his latest, and 
some will think most precious, work, ^' has been written for the 
most part in ill health and under the pressure of other duties from 
which he could not be dispensed^' — to know, to see, that the divine 
effect he desired, has been produced. The Name of Jesus! 
The Love of Jesus ! how clear the proof that both are better 
known, more deeply felt — and shall we not add, more widely, 
purely loved, than before this sun-beam shone upon us. *' As 
a son of St. Philip," said the author in the preface to the first 
edition of *'A11 for Jesus," ''I have especially to do with the 
world, and with people living in the world, and trying to be 
good there, and to sanctify themselves in ordinary vocations. 
It is to such I speak ; and I am putting before them, not high 
things, but things which are at once attractive as devotions, 
and also tend to raise their fervor, to quicken their love, and 
to increase their sensible sweetness in practical religion and its 
duties. I want to make piety bright and hap)py to those who need 
such helps, as I do myself. I have not ventured to aim higher. 
If it causes one heart to love our dearest Lord a trifle more 
warmly, God will have blessed both the work and its writer." 

This was written in May, 1853 — on St. Philip Neri's feast. 
In about a month after, a large edition of the work was dis- 
posed of. In September of the same year, on the Feast of the 
Holy Name of Mary, Father Faber could thus speak in the 
Preface to the second edition of his ever-beautiful book: "In 
again trusting my little work to the Catholics of England and 
Ireland, I wish I could say how much I have been affected by 
the reception it has met with, not as if it reflected credit on 
myself, but because it has shown that the Name of Jesus could 
not be uttered without the echo coming, and that to speak 
of Him, however poorly, was to rouse, to soothe, and to win 
the heart ; and it was more grateful to me than any praise, to 
feel that my subject was my success." 

The last advices from England bring the delightful intelli- 
gence, that besides *' the tenth and eleventh thousand of the 
library edition now in press, the publisher will also issue at the 
same time, in the same size and type, a cheap edition, i. e., the 



Vm INTRODUCTION TO THE 

People's Edition of **All for Jesus." After the sale of so 
many thousand copies in England, Ireland, France, the United 
States, and other parts of America, *' the demand is actually on 
the increase, and large orders are repeatedly coming in from 
the Colonies." A more cheering fact in the religious history 
of the day, we could not mention. And it forms a natural in- 
troduction to our remarks, though necessarily brief, on the 
next work that appeared from the learned author's pen, viz. 
** Growth in Holiness ; or, Progress in Spiritual Life. 
What more natural than that the guide who had, like the pre- 
cursor, with his sweet ^'Behold! the Lamb of God," sent so 
many disciples to follow Jesus, asking — '-Master! where 
dwellest thou ?" should not rest until he had pointed out still 
more in detail both the means and signs of that progress in the 
spiritual life, to which the apostle exhorts us to aspire without 
ceasing, " until we all meet in the unity of Faith, and of the 
knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure 
of the age of the fulness of Christ ; that we may no more be chil- 
dren tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doc- 
trine, .... but doing the truth in love, we may grow in 
all things in him, who is the Head, Christ our Lord." — Ephs. iv. 
With his usual clearness of expression, the author thus states 
the object of his second work — for we cannot do better than to 
quote his own words. " There are two objects for which books 
may be written, and which must materially affect their style. 
One is to produce a certain impression on the reader, while he 
reads : the other, to put before him things to remember, and 
in such a way as he will best remember them. The present 
work is written for the latter object, and consequently with as 
much brevity as clearness would allow, and as much compres- 
sion as the breadth of the subject and its peculiar liability to 
be misunderstood, would safely permit." Such, with a few 
additional sentences, is the introduction to one of the most 
valuable ascetic treatises, not only in the English, but in any 
of our modern languages. Though professedly more didactic, 
it abounds, like its precursor, in endless beauties of style, the 
more fascinating from the very familiarity of the language, and 
with what we can only justly call, heaven-inspired thoughts : 
for they fill the soul with thoughts of God, grief for sin, and 



AMERICAN EDITION. IX 

hopes of heaven, such as no mere earthly eloquence or wisdom 
could inspire. When, in our judgment, there is such an intel- 
lectual, spiritual feast before us, it is no easy task to point out 
where the guest will be seated best; we may be allowed to 
direct our reader's attention to the chapters entitled— *' The 
Spirit in which we serve God:" — "Spiritual Idleness:" — 
** Temptations :" — " Abiding Sorrow for Sin :" — '* The Right 
View of our Faults:" — who can read those pages, the fruit, no 
doubt, of prayer, toil, study, suffering, of which we have no 
conception, and then lay down the volume without resolving 
to say, while life lasts, one good Ave Maria daily for Father 
Faber ? Had he no other claim on our grateful remembrance 
than these two treatises, certain we are of a respectful, cordial 
response to our suggestion. But what shall we say of our 
sacred indebtedness to him, when we open his third work — 
"The Blessed Sacrament; or. The Works and W^ats of 
God" ? — the master-piece of the author's genius, learning and 
piety combined; and, as we have heard it styled, "the most 
wonderful book of the age." Over its pages, gemmed with 
thoughts, truths, facts, doctrines which Father Faber could 
have drawn from no other source than that same fountain 
whence the apostle of love drew his inspiration — the bosom of 
Jesus Christ — the mind bends, the heart lingers in admiration, 
reverence, adoration too deep for words. Our altars, our 
tabernacles, with all we there possess, are before us ; and 
whether the moment finds us in the stillness of some retired 
cell or study, on the stream of one of the hundred mighty 
rivers of our native land, or by the shore of the glistening sea, 
we realize as we never did, nor could before, the prophet's 
sublime "Altaria Tua, Domine Yirtutum!" Thy altars, 
Lord of hosts : My king and my God ! Blessed are they that 
dwell in thy house, Lord ! they shall praise thee for ever and 
ever ! Not till that day, when the sacramental veils being re- 
moved, "we shall see his face, and be happy for ever in the 
contemplation of his glory," will our Redeemer (it may be) 
make known to his servant, how deep, lasting, far-reaching, 
even to the ends of the earth, and what is farther still, the 
coldest Catholic hearts, has been the impression left by this, 
his "thank-offering for the gift of faith in this transcending 



X INTRODUCTION TO THE 

mystery." And, as if in response to these words of Israel's 
bravest king, do we hear the encouraging voice of the Holy 
Spirit addressed to the multitude who, along that road of 
*< spiritual progress," some in joy, some in grief — others again 
in silence and in hope, pursue their way, 1 Israel, how great 
is the house of God : and how vast is the place of His posses- 
sion! You shall draw waters with joy out of the Saviour's 
fountains. Rejoice and praise, for great is He that is in the 
midst of thee : the Holy One of Israel ! 

Few there are in any land or age who will ever hope to lay 
a more beauteous, richer, a more loving gift at the feet of the 
most Blessed Sacrament. But we refrain. Were we to write 
"what we have heard, and have seen with our eyes, and looked 
upon," it would only sound like flattery to the captious. " My 
object is not controversy, but piety," — we quote a few lines 
from different parts of the preface. ''This treatise is an 
attempt to popularize certain portions of the science of theology. 
It has not been an easy task : my desire has been to lay it at 
the feet of the Blessed Sacrament as a little thank-offering for 
the gift of faith in that transcending mystery, a gift given to 
me out of season and with a mysterious stretch of pardoning 
love, and which is to me the dear light of life, for whose 
abounding joy and unclouded surety no loss can be other than 
a priceless gain." 

To the work itself we must refer our readers, for no, even 
elaborate, analysis would convey a fair insight into the contents 
of the four books on the Works and Ways of God, especially 
as connected with his Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. The 
profound theological learning of the first book, we are aware, 
has repelled a certain class of devout Catholics. This glorious 
treatise has in consequence not made its way, at least with us, 
so rapidly into public favor. But even considering the scien- 
tific phraseology which abounds, for example, in Sections IV 
and V, on the Theology of Transubstantiation, we must regard 
the view taken by some rather as a wrong impression than a 
real difficulty. We open at random the edition before us. The 
first pages that meet our eye are pages 52 and 53 of the same 
first book. The subject is, the Justification of the Sinner; the 
same work of which St. Augustine says, — it is a greater thing 



AMERICAN EDITION. XI 

to justify the impious than to create heaven and earth: "a 
work which is being accomplished in a thousand confessionals, 
this day and at this hour, and in churches, in hospitals, in 
prisons, on ship-board, on the scaffold, in the streets and fields 
of daily labor, close to the mower or the reaper, or the gardener 
or the vine-dresser, who dreams not that God is in his neigh- 
borhood, so busy and at so stupendous a work." AVe entreat 
our devout, sincere objectors to read on. Better than treasures 
of gold and silver are the contents of those two pages. And 
the entire first book is replete with such passages in the midst 
of its excursions into the profoundest or sublimest provinces 
of the science of theology. Love is the harbinger of light. 
Where true devotion exists, love also dwells in the soul ; for it 
is one of its attendants, and a wiser teacher than many books 
and many masters. We cannot forego the belief, the hope that 
there are many in our land, not as yet familiar with this trea- 
tise, perchance partly because of what they have heard of it 
from others, but whose intelligence, education and piety, would 
discover a banquet in every chapter, who will soon peruse it. 
We sum up our remarks, and pass on to the latest production 
of the reverend author, with one of his own observations — to 
no modern productions, whether secular or religious, more 
truly applicable than to his own admirable works : — They abound 
*'m those pregnant germs of thought which have almost power of 
themselves to form a mind, and to expand themselves into a whole 
education.^' "^ 

Were we asked to describe in a few words the distinctive 
character of " The Creatob, and the Creature ; or, The 
Wonders of Divine Love," we would reply — It is the Funda- 
mental Philosophy of Religion. The nature of the questions 
treated, the order of its publication, the time of its appearance 
among us, all suggest the analogy between it and the well- 
known work of the immortal Balmes. But we must add, such 
is the wide dissimilarity of the two productions, that, for one 
reader who will have the courage or ability to follow Balmes 
through the labyrinth of metaphysics, and over the ruins of 
philosophical systems, ancient and modern, a thousand souls 
will learn the science of salvation at the feet of Father Faber. 
* Blessed Sacrament, Book iii, p. 2-1:9. 



Xll INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

Til ere are several statements in the Introduction to the pre- 
sent treatise, of much importance to all who are familiar with 
the writings of Dr. Faber, or may hereafter become so. We 
invite the reader's attention to them ; and also to the analysis 
of this treatise, which *' stands to the author's other works in 
the relation of source and origin." 

The four productions which we have thus briefly noticed, and 
which all who love God, their country, and their Church, should 
pray to see in the hands of every Catholic famity, form in them- 
selves a treasure of theological learning, devotional reading, 
and practical piety, to say nothing of the author's countless 
beauties of thought and language, such as, we believe, cannot 
be found in any other four works bearing the same relation to 
each other. Pages filled with our acknowledgments would not 
adequately express all that the Catholics of the present age, 
both in Europe and America, owe to Dr. Faber, to Dr. Newman, 
and, indeed, to the " Fathers of the English Oratory." Happy 
are we in the knowledge that there are many, on this side of 
**the great waters," who cannot think of them without senti- 
ments of profound gratitude, admiration and respect. Their 
labors, their sacrifices, their virtues, their victories for God and 
His Church — in a word, all that they have done, have done so 
well, in so short a time, and are still doing for the temporal 
and eternal welfare of God's world — rise up like a ''blessed 
vision of peace" between us, whenever some government-pique 
rufiles the temper of our kindred nations. At such moments, 
the earnest but almost unanswered wish of England's *' Great 
Cardinal" — for how can we speak of the English Oratory and 
not be full of the memory of Cardinal Wiseman — again presses 
us to entreat that prayer, daily prayer, may be ofi'ered up, espe- 
cially in our religious houses, for the conversion of England 
and its people. 

Shall we not hope that our thought will be welcome ; will 
awaken its echo in more than one American Catholic heart ? 
England's conversion, one might almost say, would be our own. 
In the language of Father Faber — " Why is it we let slow time 
do the work, which swift grace would so much better do ?" 

Baltimore, May, 1857. 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



It appears necessary to trespass on the reader's patience for 
a while by giving him the history of the composition of this 
Treatise. Books, reviews, conversation, personal experience, 
and the phenomena forced upon our notice in dealing with 
souls, seem to concur in showing that it is almost a character- 
istic feature of the present age, at least in this country, to 
have harsh, unkindly, jealous, suspicious, and distrustful 
thoughts of God. It is not so much that men do not believe 
in Him, as in past times, or that they are irreverently inquisi- 
tive, as they have been in other days. Infidelity and intellec- 
tual impiety are unfortunately common enough ; but they are 
not, as compared with other times, the characteristic sins of 
the day with us. We find in their place abundant admissions 
of the existence, and even of the excellence, of God ; but 
joined with this, a reluctance, which hardly likes to put itself 
into words, to acknowledge His sovereignty. There is a desire 
to strip Him of His majesty, to qualify His rights and to abate 
His prerogatives, to lower Him so as to bring Him somewhat 
nearer to ourselves, to insist on His obeying our own notions 
of the laws of morality, and confining Himself within such 
limits of justice and equity as are binding on creatures rather 
than on the Creator. There is a tendency to turn religion into 
a contract between parties, very unequal certainly, but not in- 
finitely unequal, to object to whatever in God's Providence 
betokens a higher rule than the rule of our duties towards 
each other, and to revolt from any appearance of exclusiveness, 
supreme will, and unaccountable irresponsibility, which there 
may be in His conduct towards us. This appears to be the 
attitude of the day towards God. The acknowledgment of 
Him is conditional on His submitting to be praised and ad- 
mired, as other than the God whose own will is His sole law, 
whose own glory is His necessary end, and who by virtue of 
His own perfections can have no other end, rest, or sufficiency, 
than His own ever-blessed Self. 

B ( xiii ) 



XIV AUTHOR S PREFACE. 

If this were simply a mitigated form of infidelity belonging 
to the nineteenth century, and affecting those only who are 
immersed in worldliness, the present Treatise would not have 
been written, inasmuch as it is purely practical, and addressed 
only to believers. But the epidemics of the world are never 
altogether unfelt within the Church. The air is corrupted, 
and in some much milder form the souls of believers are affected 
by the pestilence which reigns without. So is it in the present 
case. In the difficulties through which men have to force their 
way, by the help of grace, into the One True Fold, in the ob- 
stacles which hinder others from advancing in the ways of 
holiness, in the temptations which tease, if they do not en- 
danger, faith, in the treatment of religious controversies, in 
the sides men take in ecclesiastical politics, *in the tendencies 
of their theological views, and even in the common exercises of 
daily devotion, we find indubitable traces of an attitude towards 
God, caught from the fashion of the day, and which seems to 
betoken some obliquity in the mind, logically working itself out 
in the worship and obedience of our souls. It is not that be- 
lievers believe wrongly about God, but either that they do not 
understand, or that they do not realize, what they most rightly 
believe. 

It has thus come to pass, from various circumstances which 
need not be detailed, that the composition of this Treatise has 
been a work of charity towards souls, almost forced upon the 
writer in consequence of the position which he occupied, and 
the work into which such a sphere as London introduced him. 
The result of much thought on the subject led to the conclusion, 
that it is possible for the intellectual inconsistencies of men to 
realize that they have a Creator without realizing, what is 
already involved, that they themselves are creatures, or what 
is actually implied in being a creature ; and further, it seemed 
that this very inconsistency explained and accounted for the 
phenomena in question. 

The Treatise, therefore, will be found naturally to divide 
itself into three parts. The First Book, consisting of three 
chapters, is the statement of the case, and contains a descrip- 
tion of the phenomena around us, a detailed account of what 
it is to have a Creator, and of what follows from our being His 
creatures. The result of this inquiry is to find, that creation 
is simply an act of divine love, and cannot be accounted for on 
any other supposition than that of an immense and eternal 
love. The Second Book, consisting of five chapters, occupies 
itself with the difficulties and depths of this creative love, 
•which have been classified as answers to the following ques- 
tions, Why does God wish us to love Him, Why does He Him- 



author's preface. XV 

self love us, How can we love Him, How do we actually love 
Him, and How does He repay our love. Here, in other times, 
or in another country perhaps, the Treatise might have con- 
cluded. But the course of the investigation has started some 
grave objections, which the Third Book, consisting of four 
chapters, is occupied in answering. If this account of creative 
love be true, if God redeemed us because He persisted in de- 
siring, even after our fall, to have us with Him as participators 
in His own eternal beatitude, salvation ought to be easy, even 
to fallen nature. If it is easy, then it would follow that at 
least the majority of believers would be saved. If these two 
questions are answered in the affirmative, then a fresh difficulty 
rises to view. How are we to account for what is an undoubted 
fact, that these relations of the Creator and the creature are 
not practically acknowledged by creatures ? The answer to 
this objection is found in the nature, the power, and the pre- 
valence of worldliness. The flesh and the devil will not ade- 
quately account for the way in which men behave towards 
God, and the attitude in which they put themselves before 
Him. Worldliness is the principal explanation of it. But 
then the conclusions, which may be drawn from an inspection 
of worldliness, seem to dishonor, if not to destroy, the previous 
conclusions about the easiness of salvation and the multitude 
of the elect. How is it that so many can escape ? how is it 
that they do escape ? By personal love of the Creator, by a 
religion which is simply a service of love, by a love which 
brings them within the suck of that gulf of the Divine Beauty, 
which is our holiness here, as it is our happiness hereafter. 
And thus the creature secures that enjoyment and possession 
of the Creator, which was His primary intention in creation ; 
and so the Treatise ends. 

Although it seems occupied with very simple truths, and 
might almost be regarded as a commentary on the catechism, 
the composition of it has been a work both of time and labor. 
It stands to the Author's other works in the relation of source 
and origin. It has been this view of God, pondered for years, that 
has given rise to the theological bias, visible in the other books, 
as well as to the opinions expressed on the spiritual life. Dif- 
ficulties, which may have been found in the other books, re- 
specting the Sacred Humanity, the Blessed Sacrament, our Lady, 
Purgatory, Indulgences, and the like, will for the most part find 
their explanation here ; for this Treatise explains in detail the 
point of view from which the Author habitually looks at all 
religious questions, of practice as well as of speculation. 

The Author cannot allow his Treatise to go forth to the pub- 
lic, without his acknowledging the obligations he is under to 



XVI AUTHOR S PREFACE. 

the Rev. Father Gloag, the librarian of the London Oratory, 
"who has spared no pains in verifying quotations, in seeking for 
passages in voluminous works to which other writers had given 
incorrect references, or made vague allusions, and also in bring- 
ing under the notice of the Author some important passages of 
which he was not aware himself, especially with reference to 
the Baian Propositions. As the work has been written for the 
most part in ill-health, and under the pressure of other duties 
from which he could not be dispensed, the Author is the more 
anxious to acknowledge thus gratefully a co-operation, which 
circumstances rendered peculiarly valuable, and which, tedious 
and troublesome as it was, has been proffered with such a 
graceful kindness, as to make the sense of obligation a pleasure 
rather than a burden. 

In truth, though all appears so plain and smooth, the com- 
position of the Treatise has in reality led the Writer along a 
very thorny and broken path. The ground of creation, of the 
natural order and of the supernatural order, is, as theologians 
well know, strewn all over, as if a broken precipice had over- 
whelmed it, with Condemned Propositions, the theology of 
which is full of fine distinctions and insidious subtleties, and, 
not unfrequently, of apparent contradictions. Nowhere does 
the malice of error more painfully succeed in harassing the 
student, than in this matter of Condemned Propositions. The 
utmost pains, however, have been taken to secure accuracy. 
The best theologians have been collated, even to weariness; 
and if the book had been allowed to exhibit in notes or ap- 
pendices the labor which it has entailed, it would have swollen 
to an inconvenient bulk. It has, moreover, been submitted to 
two careful and minute revisions by others, in whose ability 
and theological attainments there was good reason to confide. 
But the Author cannot now entrust it to the thoughtful charity 
and kindly interpretations of his readers, without also sub- 
mitting it in all respects, and without the slightest reserve, to 
the judgment of the Church, retracting and disavowing before- 
hand any statement which may be at variance with her author- 
ized teaching, who is the sole, as well as the infallible, pre- 
ceptress of the nations in the ways of eternal truth. 



Sydenham Hill, 

Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of 

St. Peter and St. Paul, 1856. 



CONTENTS. 



BOOK I. 

THE CASE STATED BETV\^EEN THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE. 

CHAP. PAOE 

I. A new fashion of an old sin 19 

11. What it is to be a Creature 41 

TIL What it is to have a Creator 76 



BOOK II. 

THE DIFFICULTIES OF CREATIVE LOVE 

I. Why God wishes US to love Him 117 

XL Why God loves us 144 

III. Our means of loving God 179 

IV. Our actual love of God 217 

V. In what way God repays our love 239 



BOOK III. 

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 

I. The easiness of salvation , 271 

II. The great mass of believers 306 

III. The world 353 

IV. Our own God 385 

2 b2 (xvii) 



BOOK I. 

THE CASE STATED BETWEEN 

THE 



THE 



CREATOR AND THE CREATURE. 



BOOK I. 

THE CASE STATED BETWEEN THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE. 



CHAPTER I. 

A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

"Quid ad me si quis non intelligat? Gaudeat et ipse dicens: Quid 
est hoc? Gaudeat etiam sic, et amet, non inveniendo invenire potius Te, 
quam inveniendo non inyenire Te." — >S'. Augustin. 

Life is short, and it is wearing fast away. We lose a 
great deal of time, and we want short roads to heaven, 
though the right road is in truth far shorter than we 
believe. It is true of most men that their light is greater 
than their heat, which is only saying that we practice less 
than we profess. Yet there are many souls, good, noble, 
and affectionate, who seem rather to want light than heat. 
They want to know more of God, more of themselves, and 
more of the relation in which they stand to God, and then 
they would love and serve Him better. There are many 
again who, when they read or hear of the spiritual life, or 
come across the ordinary maxims of Christian perfection, 
do not understand what is put before them. It is as if 
some one spoke to them in a foreign language. Either the 
words are without meaning, or the ideas are far-fetched 

(19) 



20 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

and unreal. They stand off from persons who profess to 
teach such doctrines, or to live by them, as if they had 
some contagious disease which they might catch them- 
selves. Yet they are often very little tainted by worldli- 
ness ; often they are men who have made sacrifices for 
God, and who Avould lay down their lives for His Church. 
Their instincts are good ; yet they seem to want something ; 
and whatever it is that they lack, the absence of it appears 
to put them under a most mournful disability, in the way 
of attaining holiness. In other words, there are multitudes 
of men so good, that it seems inevitable that they must be 
much more good than they really are, and the difficulty is 
how so much goodness can continue to exist without more 
goodness. 

This is a phenomenon which has at once attracted the 
attention and excited the sorrow of all who love the souls 
for which Jesus shed His Precious Blood. It may not be 
true that any one solution of the problem will meet or ex- 
plain all the difficulties of this distressing experience. 
Much lies deep in the manifold corruption of our hearts. 
But there is one fact which goes far towards an adequate 
explanation of the matter, and which is at the same time, 
rightly considered, a profound mystery. It is that men, 
even pious men, do not continually bear in mind that they 
are creatures, and have never taken the pains to get a clear 
idea of what is involved in being a creature. Hence' it is 
true to say, even of multitudes of the faithful, that they 
have no adequate or indeed distinct notion of the relation 
in which they stand to God, of His rights, or of their obli- 
gations: and, when trial comes, their inadequate idea 
betrays them into conduct quite at variance wdth their 
antecedents. 

Forgetfulness of God has been in all ages the grand evil 
of the world : a forgetfulness so contrary to reason, and so 
opposed also to the daily evidence of the senses, that it can 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 21 

be accounted for on no other hypothesis than that of origi- 
nal sin and the mystery of the fall. This forgetfulness of 
God has been far more common than open revolt against 
Him. The last is rather the sin of angels, the first the sin 
of men. Yet every age of the vrorld has it own prevailing 
type and fashion of iniquity ; and in these latter times it 
appears as if the forgetfulness of God had taken the shape 
of forgetfulness on our part that we are creatures. Men 
may realize that they are creatures, imperfect, finite, and 
dependent. This truth may be continually coming upper- 
most in books of morals, in systems of philosophy, and in 
the general tone of society. And yet, with all this, God 
may be set aside and passed over, almost as if He did not 
exist. The world simply does not advert to Him. Who 
that has read certain philosophical and scientific books of 
the last century does not know how men could write of 
creation without their thoughts so much as touching or 
coming in contact with the idea of the Creator? To such 
writers creation seems the end of and answer to all things, 
just as the Most Holy Trinity is to a believer. They speak 
of creation, investigate creation, draw inferences from 
creation, without so much as brushing against a personal 
or living Creator even in their imagination. Creator is to 
them simply a masculine form of the neuter noun creation, 
and they have a kind of instinct against using it, which 
they have probably never perceived, or never taken the 
trouble to explain even to themselves. It is not on any 
theory, or any atheistical principle, that God is thus past 
over. He is unseen, and hence is practically considered as 
absent ; and what is absent is easily forgotten. He is out 
of mind because He is out of sight. There is no objection 
to giving God His place, only he is not thought of. This 
is one phase of the world^s forgetfulness of God. 

Then again there have been times and literary schools, 
in which God was continually referred to, and His Name 



22 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

used in an impressive manner, sometimes reverently and 
sometimes irreverently. He has been a fashionable figure 
of speech, or an adornment of eloquence, or the culminating 
point of an oratorical climax. Or there has been a decency 
in naming Him honorably, as if it vrere burning a kind of 
incense before Him. It soothes the conscience ; it gives an 
air of religion to us, and it enhances our ovrn respectability, 
especially in the eyes of our inferiors. And yet this word 
God has not in reality meant the Three Divine Persons, as 
the Gospel reveals Them to us. It has been an imaginary 
embodiment or a vague canonization of an immense povrer, 
of distant majesty, and of unimaginable mystery : a some- 
thing like the beauty of midnight skies, or the magnificent 
pageant of the storm, elevating the mind, quelling and 
tranquillizing littleness, and ministering to that poetry in 
our nature which is so often mistaken for real worship and 
actual religion. The ideas of duty, of precept, of sacrifice, 
of obedience, have been very indistinctly in the mind, if 
they have been there at all. It is the notion of a grand 
God, rather than a living God. The multitude of Ilis 
rights over us, the dread exorbitance of His sovereignty, 
the realities of His minute vigilance, of His jealous expec- 
tations, of His rigid judgments, of His particular pro- 
vidence, of His hourly interference, these things have not 
been denied, but they have not been part of the idea 
wakened in the mind by the word God. The close embrace 
and tingling pressure of His omnipresence, as theology 
discloses it to us, would have made the men of whom we 
are speaking start away in alarm or in disgust. The God 
who demands an account of every idle word, and measures 
His penalties to each unbridled thought, and before whom 
all men are simply and peremptorily equal, is a difi'erent 
Being from the poetical sovereign who reigns over the 
Olympus of modern literature, to keep our inferiors in 
check, to add gravity to our rebukes, to foster our own self- 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 23 

respect, and. in a word, to " paint a moral or adorn a tale/^ 
This God is rather our creature than our Creator ; He is 
the creature of moral respectability, the necessity of a dis- 
satisfied conscience, the convenience of a social police, the 
consolation of an unsupernatural sorrow, and the imagery 
of a chaste and elegant literature. Yet the atheism of this 
is not explicit : it is only implied. No revolt is intended. 
A false God has slipped into the place of the true one ; and 
because their faith had failed, men did not see tj^e change, 
and do not see it still. This is another common form of 
forgetfulness of God ; but it does not seem to have the 
peculiar characteristics or particular malice of the form 
which we suppose to belong eminently to our own days. 
For in the form, of which we have been speaking, the name 
of God was a necessity just because men did not forget 
that they were creatures. Nay, it was respectable and 
mora] to speak slightingly of human nature,, its weak- 
nesses, and its vagaries, and to say great things of the far- 
off God. Men's notions of God wanted correcting and 
purifying, enlarging and heightening ; above all, they 
wanted to be made real, and brought home to them, and 
laid as a yoke upon them. Nevertheless they remembered 
they were creatures; only, because they had lost the true 
idea of the Creator, they made the weaknesses of the 
creature an apology for his sin, and so went desperately 
astray. 

But if we mistake not, the characteristic malice of these 
times takes a somewhat different direction. God is cer- 
tainly ignored ; but He is rather passively than actively 
ignored, rather indirectly than directly. Men do not look 
at His side of the question at all. They do not pass Hira 
over, even contemptuously. Still less do they look at Him, 
and then put Him away. They are otherwise engaged. 
They are absorbed in the contemplation of themselves. 
Theories of progress and perfectibility throw so much dust 



24 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

in their eyes, that they do not see that they are creatures. 
They do not know what it is to be a creature, nor what 
comes of it. Hence the idea of God grows out of their 
minds : ii is thrust out of them, extruded as it were, by the 
press of matter, without any direct process or conscious 
recognition on their parts. Their minds are purely atheist 
by the force of terms. They are the proprietors of the 
world, not tenants in it, and tenants at will. They hardly 
suspect that there are any claims on them. God was a fine 
thought of the Middle Ages, and religion an organized 
priestcraft, which was not always simply an evil, but which 
has now outlived any practical utilities it may ever have 
had. God is subjective : He is an idea: He is the creature 
of man's mind. If there be any real truth in religion, it 
must be looked for in the direction of pantheism. But the 
world is too busy to think much even of that. This is 
practically their view, or would be, if they took the trouble 
to have a view at all. What it comes to is this. Men are 
masters. They begin and end with themselves. Humanity 
marches onwards with great strides to the magnificent goal 
of social perfectibility. Each generation is a glorious sec- 
tion of the procession of progress. Liberty, independence, 
speed, association, and self-praise, these compose the spirit 
of the modern world. The word creature is a name, an 
afi'air of classification, like the title of a genus or a species 
in natural history. But it has no religious consequences : 
it entangles us in no supernatural relations. It simply 
means that we are not eternal, the remembrance of which 
is salutary, in that it quickens our diligence in the pursuit 
of material prosperity. 

All phases of civilization have a monomania of their own. 
Certain favorite ideas come uppermost, and are regarded 
with so much favor that an undue importance is given to 
them, until at last the relative magnitudes of truths and 
duties are lost sight of, and the ethics of the day are full 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 25 

of a confusion that only rights itself in the failure and dis- 
appointment, in which each age of the world infallibly 
issues at the last. Then comes a reaction, and a new phase 
of civilization, and a fresh monomania ; and either because 
the circle looks like a straight line, because we see so little 
of it at a time, or because the living world, like the mate- 
rial one, really advances while it revolves, we call these 
alternations progress. Now we generally find that each 
of these monomanias, with its cant words, its fixed ideas, 
and its onesided exaggerations, transfers its temper and 
characteristics to the view which it takes of God. The 
ideas of liberty, progress, independence, social contracts, 
representative government, and the like, color our views 
of God, and influence our philosophy. No one can read 
much without seeing how the prevailing ideas of the day 
make men fall into a sort of unconscious anthropomorphism 
about God. Indeed nothing but the magnificent certainties 
and unworldly wisdom of catholic theology can rescue us 
from falling into some such error ourselves."^ At the pre- 
sent day particularly we should be careful and jealous in 
the view we take of God ; careful that it should be well as- 
certained, and jealous that it should be according to the 
pattern showed us in catholic theology.f 

* The gibe of Yoltaire is after all full of bitter truths ; depuis que Dieu a 
fait Fhomme a son image, I'homme le lui a bien rendu. 

f There are two yiews of God in theology, the Scotist and the Thomist. 
The Scotist seems to bring God nearer to us. to make our conceptions of Him 
more real, to represent Him as more accessible to our understandings, even 
"while He remains incomprehensible. St. Thomas carefully observes the 
mean : Nullum nomen univoce de Deo et creaturis prasdicatur ; sed nee etiam 
pure equivoce, ut aliqui dixerunt : and again, Aliqua dicuntur de Deo et 
creaturis, analogice, et non equivoce pure, neque pure univoce, i. q. xiii. 5 
and 6. The Thomist view, by driving us away from many of the analogies 
on which the other view rests, or by regarding these analogies as more 
equivocal, seems to put God further from us, and to thicken the darkness 
which is round His throne. But, if the Scotist view seems more directly to 
lead to love, it is exposed to much greater philosophical dangers than the 
Thomist, and may more easily be pressed into the service of anthropomor- 



26 A NEAV FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

In whatever direction we turn we shall gain fresh proof 
of the want of this true view of God, and fresh evidence 
that the peculiar forgetfulness of God in these times con- 
sists in the forgetfulness on our own part that we are 
creatures. For, think in what this forgetfulness consists. 
It is the new fashion of an old sin. Nothing offends our 
t^ste more than disproportion, or unseemliness. We like 
things to be in keeping, and when proprieties are violated, 
we have a sense of being wounded. If a servant puts on 
the manners and takes the liberties of a son, we are angry 
with him because he forgets himself, and a whole string 
of moral faults is involved in this forgetfulness. The 
manners, which befit the member of our own family, are 
unbecoming in a guest; and the demeanor and address of a 
stranger differ from those of an acquaintance. Our taste is 
annoyed when these things are confused, and the annoy- 
ance of our taste is only the symptom of something far 
deeper in our moral nature. So is it in the matter we are 
discussing. The propriety of man as man, his moral and 
religious propriety, consists in his constantly remembering 

phism, perhaps of pantheism. Thus the Thomist view is safer. "You ought 
to know," says 3Ialebranche. (Huitieme Entretien sur la Metaphysique. sec. 
7.) "that to judge worthily of God we must attribute to Him no attributes, 
but those which are incomprehensible. This is evident, for God is the infi- 
nite in every sense, so that nothing finite is congruous to Him, and that 
which is infinite in every sense is in every way incomprehensible to the 
human mind." So also TertuUian adv Marcion, i. 4. Summum Magnum, ex 
defectione semuli, solitudinem quamdam de singularitate pragstantife suaa 
possidens, unicum est. So it has been well observed by Simon in his beau- 
tiful but insidious work on natural religion, (Religion Xaturelle, 48,) that we 
almost all of us start from the Christian idea of God as author of the world, 
and land at the pagan idea of God like ourselves. All beings, except God, 
are in a system. It is their nature and condition. He alone is outside of 
and above all system ; and thus by applying to Him our principles, we run 
into contradictions, and by attributing to Him our faculties, we became en- 
tangled in impossibilities. Thus a clear and intelligent view of God is one of 
the first requisites for all of us at this day; and it is just this view which the 
catholic cathechism gives, and which all the wise men of the world seem so 
unaccountably to miss. 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 27 

that he is a creature, and deme^niDg himself accordingly. 
The bad taste and vulgarity (to use words which may make 
the meaning clearer) of his not doing so are in reality sin 
and irreligion, because the contempt, presumption, and 
affectation, fall upon the majesty of the Most High God. 
Yet is not this forgetfulness quite a characteristic of the 
times in which we live? 

Look at politics ; and may we not read evidences of this 
spirit everywhere ? How little has religion to do with 
questions of peace and war? We go to war to avenge an 
offence, or to push an interest, or to secure a gain, or to 
cripple a hostile power, as if there was no God of Hosts. 
We do not ask ourselves the question whether it is God's 
will that there should be such a war. The whole action 
of diplomacy is as if there were no special providence, and 
as if God having retired from the management of the 
world, we must take up the reins w^hich He has let fall 
from His wearied grasp. Since the balance of power was 
substituted for the central unity of the Holy See, we have 
come more and more to act as if the world belonged to us, 
and we had the management of it, and were accountable 
to none. On the most solemn subjects, even those of edu- 
cation, and religion, and the interests of the poor, how little 
of the tone and feeling of creatures is exhibited in debates 
in parliament, or in the leading articles of a newspaper. 
It would seem as if there were nothing we had not the 
right to do, because nothing we had not the power to do. 
With far less of intentional irreligion than would have 
seemed possible beforehand, there is an incalculable amount 
of forgetfulness that we are creatures. What else is our 
exaggerated lust of liberty ? What else are even the 
vauntings of our patriotism? What else is the spirit of 
puerile self-laudation into which our national character 
seems in the hands of an anonymous press to have already 
degenerated, or to be fast degenerating? 



28 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

The same tone is observable in our poetry and elegant 
literature. Everywhere man is his own end, and the 
master of his own destiny. Subordination and a subject 
spirit are not virtues, neither in works of fiction do the 
meek inherit the earth."^ Still more strongly does this 
come out in systems of philosophy. Humanity is a person 
with a unique destination and perfectibility. Man is com- 
plete in himself. There is neither wreck nor ruin about 
him. The natural stands off, clear and self-helpful, from 
the supernatural. Accountableness is not a necessary part 
of self-government. There is no need to call in the idea of 
God in order to explain the situation of man. His duties 
begin and end with other men or with himself. Philo- 
sophically speaking, things can be managed at Berlin with- 
out God. 

But of all things the most amazing is the innocent, child- 
like, simple-hearted atheism of physical science. The be- 
ginning of matter, the elements into which it may ultimately 
be resolvable, how the cycles of the heavenly bodies first 
began, the unspeakable intricacy of their checks and coun- 
terchecks, the secular aberrations and secular corrections 
of the same, the secret of life, the immateriality of the soul, 
where physical science ends, — all these questions are dis- 
cussed in a thousand books in a spirit and tone betokening 
the most utter forgetfulness that we are little creatures, 
who got here, God help us! not by our own means, and are 
going, God help us ! where He chooses and when. We read 
sentence after sentence, expecting every moment to light on 
the word God, or to come across some allusion to the 
Creator. And the writers would not omit Him, but would 
speak good words of Him, if it came to them to do so. But 
it does not. They are not unbelievers. Nay, they would 

* E. G. see Kingsley's Two Years Ago, a work by an Anglican clergyman, 
propounding wliat the Saturday Review satirically termed a ''muscular 
Christianity." 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 29 

loudly profess themselves to be creatures and to have a 
Creator, if they were asked. They would be lunatics if they 
did not. But the double sense of His creation and of their 
createdness (to coin a word) is not in all their thoughts, 
and has not mastered the current of their intellectual acti- 
vity. They left God at church yesterday, and are closeted 
with matter to-day. So many secondary causes are waiting 
for an audience that their time is fully occupied. Besides, 
is there not one day in the week fixed for the reception of 
the First Cause, and the acknowledgment of His claims ? 
But, to be serious, no one we think will say that modern 
science, at least in England, is profane and irreligious. 
Keally it is most creditably the contrary. It is ourselves 
whom we forget : we forget that Ave are creatures. Our 
error about God comes from a mistake about ourselves. 

There are many persons in these days who do not say 
they are not Christians ; yet who write and. speak as it 
were from without, as if they were at once Christians, and 
not Christians. They have not taken the pains to formulize 
a positive disbelief; but they do not see how progress, and 
perfectibility, and modern discovery, psychological or other- 
wise, comport with that collection of ancient dogmas which 
make up the Christian religion, and their instinct would be 
to give up the dogmas rather than the discoveries, and that 
with a promptitude worthy of modern enlightenment. With 
such persons the dignity of man is a matter of prime con- 
sideration, while, in their view, his assent to the doctrines 
and practices of the Church is as degrading to his intellec- 
tual nobility, as his obedience to them is superstitious and 
debasing. The pope and theology, the Blessed Virgin and 
the Saints, grace and the sacraments, penance and purga- 
tory, scapulars and rosaries, asceticism and mysticism, 
combine to form a perfectly distinct and cognizable charac- 
ter. They give a tone to the mind and a fashion to the 
conduct, which is indubitable, and which it is difficult to 

c2 



30 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

mistake. In the Church such a character is held in honor. 
It is the catholic type of spiritual beauty. But the men, 
of whom we are speaking, are far from holding it in esteem. 
To them it appears mean, weak, tame, contemptible, cow- 
ardly, narrow, pusillanimous. It wants the breadth and 
daring of moral greatness, according to their view of great- 
ness. Nothing grand, lasting, or spreading will come of it. 
But let us put out of view for the moment the undoubted 
agents in the formation of this character, the pope and 
theology, the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, grace and the 
sacraments, penanceand purgatory, rosaries and scapulars, 
asceticism and mysticism. Let us take the character as 
we find it, without enquiring into the process of its forma- 
tion. Granting that there is a God, eternal and all-holy, 
granting that we are His creatures, created simply for His 
glory, dependent upon Him for all things, and without any 
possibility of happiness apart from Him, granting His per- 
fections and our imperfections, is not the behaviour, the 
demeanor, of a catholic saint, precisely what would come 
of a wise and reflective apprehension of the fact that he is 
a creature and has a Creator ? Does not Christian sanctity 
with inimitable gracefulness express to the life the modest, 
truthful, prevailing sense that we are creatures, standing 
before the eye and living in the hand of our everlasting 
Creator? And are not the selfsufficiency, the daring, the 
vainglory, the speed, the unhesitatingness, the reckless 
manners, which many esteem to be moral and intellectual 
bravery, just so many evidences of forgetfulness that we 
are creatures ? Are they not vagaries and improprieties, 
which, to put out of sight their falsehood and their crimi- 
nality, are as if a worm would fain attempt to fly or a 
monkey to ape the manners of a man ? It is not true that 
the practices and devotions and sacramental appliances of 
the Church introduce something which is incongruous and 
out of keeping, something to be added to our human life, 



A NEW FASHION OF AN^ OLD SIN. 31 

but still an addition easily discernible, and not dovetailing 
into our natural position. On the contrary the manners 
which they form are simply the most perfect, the most 
graceful, the most sensible and self-consistent exhibition 
of our indubitable condition, that of finite and dependent 
creatures. The supernatural grace, of which these prac- 
tices are the channels, at once completes and restores our 
nature, and makes us eminently and winningly natural. 
If Christianity were not true, the conduct of a wise man, 
who acted consistently as a creature who had a Creator, 
would strangely resemble the behavior of a catholic saint. 
The lineaments of the catholic type would be discernible 
upon him, though his gifts would not be the same. 

This forgetfulness that we are creatures, which prevails 
in that energetically bad portion of the world which is 
scripturally called tlie icorld, affects multitudes of persons, 
who are either less able to divest themselves of the influ- 
ences of old traditions and early lessons, or are happily less 
possessed with the base spirit of the world. It leads them 
to form a sort of religion for themselves which singularly 
falls in with all the most corrupt propensities of our hearts: 
a religion which in effect teaches that we can live two lives 
and serve two masters. Such persons consider that religion 
has its own sphere, and worldly interests their sphere also, 
and that the one must not interfere with the other. Thus 
their tendency is to concentrate all the religion of the week 
into Sunday, and to conceive that they have thereby pur- 
chased a right to a large conscience for the rest of the week. 
The world, they say, has its claims and God has His claims. 
Both must be satisfied ; God first, and most scrupulously ; 
then the world, not less exactly, though it be indeed secon- 
dary. But it is not a " reasonable service ^^ to neglect one 
for the other. God and the world are coordinate powers, 
coordinate fountains of moral duty and obligation. He 
is the really religious man who gives neither of them 



32 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

reason to complain. We must let our common sense hin- 
der us from becoming over-righteous. Men who hold this 
doctrine, a doctrine admirably adapted for a commercial 
country, have a great advantage over the bolder men of 
whom we spoke before. For they enjoy all the practical 
laxity of unbelievers, without the trouble or responsibility 
of disbelieving ; and besides that, they enjoy a certain 
good-humour of conscience in consequence of the outward 
respect they pay, in due season and fitting place, to the 
ceremonies of religion. 

Hitherto we have spoken of classes of persons in whom 
we take no interest, further than the sorrow which all who 
love God must feel at seeing Him defrauded of His honor, 
and all who love their fellow-men in seeing so much amia- 
bility, so much goodness, with a millstone round its neck 
which must inevitably sink it in the everlasting deeps. 
Let us come now to those with whom we are very much 
concerned ; and for whom we have ventured to compose 
this little treatise. Errors filter from one class of men into 
another, and appear in difi'erent forms according to the new 
combinations into which they enter. We are all of us more 
afi"ected by the errors which prevail around us than we 
really suppose. Almost every popular fallacy has its repre* 
sentative even among the children of faith ; and as when 
a pestilence is raging, many are feeble and languid though 
they have no plague-spot, so is it in matters of religion. 
The contagion of the world does us a mischief in many 
ways of which we are hardly conscious ; and we often 
injure ourselves in our best and highest interests by views 
and practices, to which we cling with fatal obstinacy, little 
suspecting the relationship in which they stand to widely 
spread evils, which we behold in their naked deformity in 
other sections of society, and hold up to constant reproba- 
tion. The forgetfiilness that we are creatures, which pro- 
duces the various consequences already mentioned, is an 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 33 

error which is less obviously hateful than a direct forgetful- 
ness of God, and consequently it wins its way into holy 
places where the other would find no admittance, or scant 
hospitality. Good Christians hear conversation around 
them, catch the prevailing tone of society, read books, and 
become familiarized with certain fashionable principles of 
conduct ; and it is impossible for their minds and hearts 
not to become imbued with the genius of all this. It is 
irksome to be always on our guard, and from being off our 
guard we soon grow to be unsuspicious. When a catholic 
enters into intimate dealings with protestants, he must not 
forget to place his sentries, and to act as if he was in an 
enemy's country ; and this is unkindly work, and as mise- 
rable as it is unkindly. Yet so it is. When newspapers 
tell us that Catholicism is always more reasonable and less 
superstitious when it is in the immediate presence of pro- 
testantism, they indicate something which they have ob- 
served, namely, a change. Now if our religion be changed 
by protestantism, we can have little difficulty in deciding 
whether it has changed for the better or the worse. All 
this illustrates what we mean. The prevailing errors of our 
time and country find their way down to us, and corrupt 
our faith, and lower our practice, and divide us among our- 
selves. This unstartling error of forgetting that we are 
creatures is thus not without grave influence upon con- 
scientious catholics ; and it is to this point that we are ask- 
ing your attention. 

It is beyond all question among Christians that there are 
such things in religion as the counsels of perfection, and 
that the true way of serving God is to do so out of love. 
No one doubts but that a saint is a man who loves God 
ardently and tenderly, who attempts great things for His 
honor, and makes painful sacrifices to promote His glory. 
No one imagines a saint to be one who does no more than 
he is obliged to, and who, having just avoided mortal sin, 
3 



34 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

is careless about venial faults, and takes his ease and liberty 
outside the verge of strict and certain precepts. The Church 
possesses a w^hole literature which is occupied with nothing 
else than teaching these principles of Christian perfection, 
as they are called. Many of these books, such as the 
Imitation of Christ, are in such repute that it would be 
rash and presumptuous to question what they teach; and 
there are others of the very highest spirituality, such as 
the works of St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, to 
which the Church has given her most solemn approval. 
Persons accustomed to the perusal of these books regard 
the axioms on which their teaching is based as almost self 
evident. They know on the authority of the church that 
there ought not to be two opinions on the matter ; but even 
independently of that, they cannot conceive as a matter of 
common sense how there can possibly be two opinions about 
it. Even if men might go wrong on such a question, how 
could they do so in point of fact ? 

Nevertheless there are numbers of catholics, who, strange 
to say ! see the question in a different light. The teaching 
of spiritual books and the doctrines of perfection, as laid 
down by the most approved writers, do not recommend 
themselves to them. They consider that, unless they are 
under the vows of some monastic order, they should aim 
at nothing more than the avoiding of mortal sin, and giving 
edification to those around them. They are good people. 
They go to mass ; they aid or start missions ; they counte- 
nance the clergy ; they are kind to the poor ; they say the 
rosary; they frequent the sacraments. Yet when any one 
talks to them of serving God out of personal love to Him, 
of trying to be daily more and more closely united to Him, 
of cultivating the spirit of prayer, of constantly looking 
out to see what more they can do for God, of mortifying 
their own will in things allowable, of disliking the spirit 
of the world even in manifestations of it which are short 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 85 

of sin, and of living more consciously in the presence of 
God, they feel as if they were listening to an unknown 
language. They have a jealousy, almost a dislike, of such 
truths, quite irrespective of any attempt being made to 
force such a line of conduct upon themselves. If they are 
humble they are puzzled : if they are self-opinionated, they 
are angry, critical, or contemptuous, as the case may be. 
There are many others to whom such views are simply 
new, and who with modesty and self-distrust are shaken 
by them, and to some extent receive them. Still upon the 
whole such doctrines have a sound in their ears of being 
ultra and extravagant, or poetical and fanciful, or peculiar 
and eccentric. 

Now it must be beyond a doubt to any catholic scholar 
that such persons are completely out of harmony with a 
considerable and important part of the catholic system, 
that they think differently from the saints and holy men, 
and that a great deal of what the church has approved is 
new, startling, and perhaps displeasing to them. This is a 
very strong way of putting it; but we do not see that it 
goes beyond the truth. They do not view it in this light 
themselves. God forbid ! but this is what it comes to in 
effect. 

In speaking of unbelievers, we pointed out that the 
character formed by the peculiar doctrines, devotions, and 
practices of the catholic church, was not something mon- 
strous, or exotic, or unnatural, as they are too often in the 
habit of considering it. We maintained that it rested on 
the undeniable common-sense view that we are creatures, 
the creatures of an Almighty Creator, and that a man who 
acted consistently, (if unassisted nature could do so,) as a 
creature, would not be unlike a catholic saint: always 
excepting the practice of voluntary mortification, and all 
the shapes of love of suffering, for these are ideas peculiar 
to the kingdom of the Incarnation, or to such false religions 



36 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

as retain in distorted shapes great portions of the primitive 
tradition which prophesied of the expiation of sin by the 
Ticarioiis sufferings of a Redeemer. So now we would call 
the attention of the good people, of whom we are at present 
speaking, to a similar fact. The doctrines of Christian per- 
fection and the teaching of approved spiritual books do not 
rest upon any peculiarity of any school of theology, or upon 
any special spirit of a religious order, or on the idiosyn- 
crasy of any particular saint, or upon any unusual and 
miraculous vocation, but simply on the fact of our being 
creatures. Even the practices of voluntary penance or of 
acquired contemplation, though not of obligation, at least 
rise naturally and easily out of the relations in v/hich we 
every one of us stand to God as our Creator. There is 
nothing in the whole range of asceticism which does not 
turn out at last to be, a natural and logical result of our 
position in the world as the creatures of a Creator: and 
hence there is nothing in such practices fanciful, eccentric, 
or intrinsically indiscreet: though wrong time, wrong place, 
wrong measure, can make anything indiscreet. 

From this fact we draw two inferences. The first is that 
the strangeness of the doctrines of spirituality to these 
excellent persons is attributable, without their knowing it, 
to the prevailing forgetfulness that we are creatures. They 
are unsuspectingly influenced by the very evil which gives 
its tone and color to the unbelief and worldliness of the 
times. They have no distinct conception of the relation in 
which their being creatures places them with regard to 
the Creator, nor of what comes of it in the way of practical 
religion. It has probably never occurred to them that it 
was a subject which needed study. Hence, unprovided 
with antidotes to the poison they were compelled daily to 
imbibe, an imperceptible change has passed upon them, or 
the poison of the error has been beforehand with the truth, 
or, in the case of converts, it has troubled the processes of 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 37 

conversion, and stopped them short of their legitimate com- 
pletion: for almost all come into the Church only half con- 
verted, and several remain so to the last. Thus they have 
come as it vrere by instinct to rise up in arms against a 
claim which is urged in behalf of God. Next they have 
jealously examined His claims, in a commercial spirit, and 
with a bias towards themselves. Then they have put limits 
to His service, made a compromise with Him, reduced Him 
from a Creator to a being, who is to tax and to tythe, and 
no more, for He is a constitutional monarch and not de- 
spotic, and they have come to regard notions of perfection 
with disfavor, as an unconstitutional aggression on the part 
of God or His executive. Now every one of these six pro- 
cesses says as loudly and plainly as it can, ** I am not a 
creature. There is some such sort of equality between 
God and myself, as that I am entitled to come to terms with 
Him.^' Moreover the spirit in which all this is done is 
equally incompatible with the modest position of a creature. 
It is as if they were the judges, as if they possessed some 
inalienable, indefeasible rights of their own. There is no 
diffidence, no self-distrust. They see their way more clearly, 
and assert their supposed liberty more positively, than they 
would do in matters which concerned the claims and inte- 
rests of their fellow-citizens. It would make a great 
change, we will not say how great, in them, if they realized 
and clearly comprehended the relation in which a creature, 
necessarily as a creature, stands to his Creator. 

My second inference is, that, as the doctrines and prac- 
tices of spirituality rest mainly on our position as creatures, 
and simply on our position as redeemed creatures, the com- 
mon evasion that they belong to the cloister, and are pecu- 
liar to monks and nuns, will not hold good and cannot be 
maintained. A monk is no more a creature than a soldier 
or a sailor, a billiard-marker or a jockey, and no more 
comes out of his relation to the Creator than out of theirs. 

D 



38 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

There may be questions of degree in the amount diflferent 
men may do for God ; there surely can be none as to the 
principles on which, and the spirit in which, He is to be 
served. Monks and nuns have given up their liberty by 
the heroism of vows. They are obliged to the practices of 
perfection, or to apply themselves to the acquisition of them. 
Theirs is a glorious captivity, in which supernatural charity 
has bound them hand and foot, and handed them over to 
the arms of their Creator. They have used the original 
liberty He gave them in the grandest of ways, by voluntarily 
surrendering it. All then that distinguishes the Christian 
in his family from the monk in his community is his liberty. 
If he is to serve God at all it must be on the same principle 
as the monk. There are not two spiritualities, one for the 
world and one for the cloister. God is one ; God's character 
is one; our necessary relation to Him is one. There are 
many distinct things in spirituality to which people in the 
world are not bound, many which can with difficulty be 
practised in the world, many which it would be unwise for 
most persons to attempt to practise in the world, and some 
which it would be actually impossible to practise there. 
But whatever differences there may be in the amount done 
for God, or the manner of doing it, or the obligations under 
which it is done, there can be no difference in the principle on 
which it is done. God must be served out of love. This is 
the first and great commandment. No one is condemned 
except for mortal sin ; but any man who starts professedly 
on the principle that he will do no more than avoid mortal 
sin, and that God shall have no more out of him, will in- 
fallibly not succeed in his single object, that is to say, he 
will not avoid mortal sin. Though he is not bound to do 
more than this in order to secure his salvation, yet because 
he has gone on a wrong principle, it will, just because it is 
a principle and not merely a mistake or a negligence, 
carry him far further than he intended, and end by being 



A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD !SIN. 39 

his ruin. He will fail in his object, because he made it 
exclusively his object. Love is the sole principle of the 
creature^s service of his Creator, hov^rever remiss that love 
maybe. Thus then, if it be true that the doctrines and 
practices of Christian perfection are simply based on God^s 
love of us and our love of Him, that is, the relation between 
the creature and the Creator, it is either true that monks 
are more God's creatures than we are, or that, in our mea- 
sure^ and degree, the principles of perfection are as appli- 
cable to ourselves as to them. 

We are not going to write a book on perfection. Very 
far from it. But we believe that the ruling spirit of the 
age is rather a forgetfulness that we are creatures, than a 
forgetfulness of the Creator ; that many more persons are 
infected with this evil than have any suspicion of it ; that 
it lies at the bottom of all the objections men make to the 
doctrines of spirituality ; and, furthermore, that many more 
persons would try to serve God, would frequent the sacra- 
ments, avoid sin, and be ordinarily good catholics, if they 
had a clear view of the relations between themselves and 
God, as creature and Creator. Hence, we are undertaking 
what may seem a childish, or at least an unnecessary, work. 
We wish to explain, or to state rather than to explain, the 
first elements of all practical religion, the A B C of devo- 
tion. We want to write a primer of piety ; and to do so in 
the plainest, easiest, most unadorned style. The experience 
of the priesthood has led us to think that we shall serve 
Bouls by putting forward what every one thinks he knows 
already, and what he will say he knew before as soon as he 
reads it. Nevertheless, these common-places are not so 
well known as they should be. Their very commonness 
leads men to overlook them ; and we trust that not a few 
readers, if they will follow us patiently, will find that both 
head and heart will have learned not a little in the study. 
All our duties to God, and to ourselves no less, are 



40 A NEW FASHION OF AN OLD SIN. 

founded on the fact that we are creatures. All religion is 
based on the sense that we are creatures. The foolishness 
of this simple truth will bring to nought the pride of the 
wise world. It will be as the plain stone of the common 
brook against the might and bravery of the giant of modern 
misbelief. We speak to simple-hearted believers. We put 
no high things before them, but rather the lessons of a vil- 
lage dame. We draw no conclusions, and urge no definite 
duties. We only ask our dear readers to try to put together 
with us a few obvious matters of fact about our heavenly 
Father, and then leave it to grace and our own hearts what 
is to come of it all. We will therefore ask each other some 
such questions as these — What is it, as children express 
themselves, what is it to be a creature ? — What is it to have 
a Creator? — Why does God wish us to love Him? — Why 
does He love us ? — How can we love Him ? — How do we 
repay His love of us ? — How does He repay our love of 
Him ? — Is it easy to be saved? — And what becomes of the 
great multitude of believers ? 

What if, when we put our answers together, something 
new and striking comes of it all? What if it warms our 
hearts, and moistens our eyes ? Any how it is very sweet 
to talk of God. There is no holyday in the world like it. 
So, dear readers, take this weary and disagreeable chapter 
as a preface to something better, something easier, simpler, 
heartier, and more loving ; and let us begin, as little chil- 
dren, at the very beginning. 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 41 



CHAPTER II. 

WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

Si homo mille annis serviret Deo etiam ferventissime, non mereretur ex 
condigno dimidiam diem esse in regno coelorum. — >S. Anselm. 

Let us sit down upon the top of this fair hill. The clear 
sunshine and the bright air flow into us in streams of life 
and gladness, while our thoughts are lifted up to God, and 
our hearts quietly expand to love. Beneath us is that 
beautiful rolling plain, with its dark masses of summer 
foliage sleeping in the sun for miles and miles away, in the 
varying shades of blue and green, according to the distance 
or the clouds. There at our feet is the gigantic city, 
gleaming with an ivory whiteness beneath its uplifted but 
perpetual canopy of smoke. The villa-spotted hills beyond 
it, its almost countless spires, its one huge many-steepled 
palace, and its solemn presiding dome, its old bleached 
tower, and its squares of crowded shipping — it all lies below 
us in the peculiar sunshine of its own misty magnificence. 
There, in every variety of joy and misery, of elevation and 
depression, three million souls are working out their com- 
plicated destinies. Close around us the air is filled with 
the songs of rejoicing birds, or the pleased hum of the in- 
sects that are drinking the sunbeams, and blowing their 
tiny trumpets as they weave and unweave their mazy dance. 
The flowers breathe sweetly, and the leaves of the glossy 
shrubs are spotted with bright creatures in painted surcoat 
or gilded panoply, while the blue dome above seems both 
taller and bluer than common, and is ringing with the loud 

d2 



42 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

peals of the unseen larks, as the steeples of the city ring 
for the nation^s victory. Far off from the river-flat comes 
the booming of the cannon, and here, all unstartled, round 
and round the pond, a fleet of young perch are sailing in 
the sun, slovrly and undisturbedly as if they had a very 
grave enjoyment of their little lives. What a mingled 
scene it is of God and man ! And all so bright, so beauti- 
ful, so diversified, so calm, opening out such fountains of 
deep reflection, and of simple-hearted gratitude to our 
Heavenly Father. 

What is our uppermost thought? It is that we live, and 
that our life is gladness. Our physical nature unfolds itself 
to the sun, while our mind and heart seem no less to bask 
in the bright influences of the thought of God. Animate 
and inanimate, reasoning and unreasoning, organic and 
inorganic, material and spiritual — what are these but the 
names and orders of so many mysteries, of so many sci- 
ences, which are all represented in this sunny scene? We, 
like the beetles and the perch, like the larks and the clouds, 
like the leaves and the flowers, like the smoke-wreaths of 
the cannon and the surges of the bells, are the creatures 
of the One True God, lights and shades in this creature- 
picture, kith and kin to all the things around us, in near 
or in remote degree. How did we come to live ? Why do 
we live? How do we live? What is our life? Where did 
it come from ? Whither is it going? What was it meant 
for? All that the sun shines upon is real ; and we are real 
too. Are we to be the beauty of a moment, part of earth^s 
gilding, to warm ourselves in the sun for a while, and glit- 
ter, and add to the hum of life on the planet, and then go 
away, and go nowhere? The beautiful day makes us happy 
with a childish happiness, and it sends our thoughts to first 
principles, to our alphabet, to the beginnings of things. 

But we must begin with a little theology, before we can 
fall back upon the simple truths of the catechism. We are 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 43 

not on safe ground, although it is such simple ground. 
Baius, Jansenius, and Quesnel have contrived so to obscure 
and confound and divorce the orders of nature and grace, 
that we cannot treat at any length of the subject of creation, 
unless we start with some sort of profession of faith. 
Theologians, in order to get a clear view of the matter, 
consider human nature as either possible or actual in five 
different states. The first is a state of pure nature. In this, 
man would have been created, of course without sin, but 
also without sanctifying grace, without infused virtues, and 
without the helps of a supernatural order. None of these 
things would have been due to his nature regarded in itself. 
He would have been obnoxious to hunger and thirst, to toil, 
diseases, and death, because his nature is compound and 
material, and contains the principles of these inconveniences 
within itself. He would have been subject also to ignorance 
and to concupiscence, and his happiness would have con- 
sisted in his knowledge and love of God as the author of 
nature, whose precepts he would have observed by means 
of what is called natural grace. This natural grace requires 
a word of explanation. What is due to nature we do not 
call grace ; in a certain sense God is bound to give it to us. 
But He is not bound so to combine secondary causes that 
the right thoughts and motives requisite for us to govern 
ourselves and control our passions should rise in our minds 
at the right time, or even if such assistance were due to 
nature in the mass, it would not perhaps be due to it in the 
individual. Nevertheless we suppose such an assistance to 
be essential to a state of pure nature, and as it is over and 
above what our nature can claim of itself, we call it grace, 
but grace of the natural, not of the supernatural order. In 
the time of St. Thomas some theologians held that Adam 
was created in this state, and remained in it for a time, 
until he was subsequently endowed with sanctifying grace, 
and raised to a supernatural end. This is now however 



44 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE 

universally rejected. Both angels and men were created 
in a state of grace. The orders of nature and grace, though 
perfectly distinct and on no account to be confused, did as 
a matter of fact start together in the one act of creation, 
without any interval of time between. This state therefore 
was possible, but never actual. 

The second condition of human nature is the state of in- 
tegrity. Baianism and Jansenism regard this as identical 
with the state of pure nature ; but catholic theology consi- 
ders it as endowed with a certain special perfection, over 
and above the perfections due to it for its own sake : and 
the twenty-sixth proposition of Baius is condemned because 
it asserts that this integrity was due to nature, and its na- 
tural condition. It consists in the perfect subjection of the 
body to the soul, and of the sensitive appetite to the reason, 
and thus confers upon man a perfect immunity from igno- 
rance, concupiscence, and death. It inserts in our nature 
a peculiar vigor by which this glorious dominion of the 
soul is completed and sustained, while the tree of life, it is 
supposed, would have preserved the material part of our 
nature from the corroding influence of age."^ Of this state 
also we may say that it was possible but never actual ; be- 
cause, while it is true of Adam as far as it goes, he never 
was, as a matter of fact, left to the possession of his in- 
tegrity without the supernatural addition of sanctifying 
grace. 

The third condition of human nature is the state of in- 
nocence. By this Adam in the first instant of his creation, 
or as some say immediately afterwards, had the theological 

* Here theologians differ. Some include the immunity from disease and 
death in the state of integrity; as Billuart. Others refer it to the state of 
innocence: as Viva. The difference is not of consequence to our present 
purpose. See Billuart. Praeambula ad tract, de gratia: and Viva de Gratia 
Adamica in his Trutina thesium Quesnellianarum. See also Ripalda's Dis- 
putation on the Baian Propositions, which Mr. Ward of St. Edmund's College 
has published in a separate form. 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 45 

and moral virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, infused 
into him, inasmuch as he was created in a state of grace, 
and elevated to the supernatural end of participating in 
the beatitude of God by the Beatific Vision. He was like- 
wise endowed with such a perfect science both of natural 
and supernatural things, as became the preceptor and ruler 
and head of the human race ; and a similar science would 
have been easily acquired by his descendants in a state of 
innocence, though as they would not have been the heads 
of the race, it would probably not have been infused into 
them from the first. This innocence is what we call original 
justice, to express by one word the aggregate of gifts and 
habits which compose it; and what constituted man in this 
state was the one simple quality of sanctifying grace, by 
which the soul was perfectly subject to God, not only as 
its natural, but also as its supernatural author. This is 
the teaching of the Church; whereas the heresies of Baius 
and Jansenius hold that the grace of Adam produced only 
human merits, and was a natural sequel of creation, and 
due to nature on its own account.^ This state of innocence, 
or original justice, was that in v/hich, as a matter of fact, 
Adam was created. 

The fourth condition of man is the state of fallen, while 
the fifth is that of redeemed nature, to which may be added 
the state of glorified nature, and the state of lost nature, in 
which ultimately the other states must issue. Our present 
purpose does not require us to enter upon these. We will 
only stop to point out a very beautiful and touching ana- 
logy. Just as the separate orders of nature and grace 
were by the sweet love of God started in the same act, so 
the promise of the Saviour and the actual operation of 
saving grace followed at once upon the fiill, and fallen na- 
ture was straightway placed upon the road of reparation 

* The 21st and 14th Propositions of Baius. 



46 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

and redemption. Thus is it always in the love of God. 
There is a pathetic semblance of impatience about it, an 
eagerness to anticipate, a quickness to interfere, an unne- 
cessary profusion in remedying, a perpetual tendency to 
keep outstripping itself and outdoing itself: and in all 
these ways is it evermore overrunning all creation, beauti- 
fying and glorifying it with its own eternal splendors. 

What, then, we must bear in mind throughout, is this, 
that the orders of nature and grace are in reality quite 
distinct; that God must be regarded as the author of both; 
and that we must continually bear in mind this distinction, 
if we would avoid the entanglement of errors which have 
been noted in the Condemned Propositions. At the same 
time, we shall speak of God, throughout, as at once the 
author of both these orders, and of creation as represent- 
ing both; because, as a matter of fact, they both started 
in creation, in the case both of angels and of men.^ Out 

* Soe Propositions xxxiv. of Quesnel and i. of Baius, also xxxt. of Quesnel 
and xxi. of Baius. It will be observed, that we carefully avoid the contro- 
versy about the condemnation of the xxxivth proposition of Baius, on the 
distinction of the double love of God, as author of nature and author of 
beatitude. Suarez and Yasquez quote Cardinal Toledo (who was sent to 
Louvain on the subject, by Gregory XIII., and may therefore be supposed 
to have known the Pope's mind), as saying that some of the propositions of 
Baius were only condemned because of the bitter language used of the oppo- 
site opinion. Billuart and others are very vehement against this. On the 
xxxivth proposition, in particular, Yasquez and De Lugo take one side, and 
Suarez, Yiva, Pvipalda, and the Thomists generally, the other. See Yasq, 1, 
2. p. Disp. 195, cap. 2. De Lugo de Fide disp. 9, n. 11-13. The controversy 
does not concern us, because we are regarding the two orders of nature 
and grace, throughout, as starting simultaneously in creation, distinct yet 
contemporary, and are also studiously regarding God as the author of both. 
We have, therefore, nothing to do with the question, whether, in order to a 
true act of love, we must explicitly regard God as the author of the super- 
natural order. In order to avoid multiplying notes, the reader is requested 
not to lose sight of this fact throughout the whole treatise. Yau Ranst, in 
commenting (page 29) on the proposition of Baius, quotes the following 
passage of St. Thomas from his commentai-y on the first epistle to the Corin- 
tliiaus: Amor est quasdam vis unitiva. et omnis amor in unione quadam 
con?i.stit. Unde secundum diversas unioncs diversa^ species amicitise distin- 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 47 

of this significant fact, that God created neither angels nor 
men in a state of mere nature, our view of God materially 
proceeds. It is a fact which reveals volumes about Him. 
It stamps a peculiar character upon creation, and origi- 
nates obligations which greatly influence the relations of 
the creature to his Creator. Creation was itself a gratui- 
tous gift. But, granting creation, nothing was due to the 
natures either of angels or men, but what those natures 
respectively could claim on grounds intrinsic to themselves. 
It was to have been expected beforehand, that God would 
have created them in a state of perfect nature. It is a 
surprise that it was not so. On the very threshold of 
theology, we are arrested by this mysterious fact, that 
rational creatures came from their Creator's hands in a 
supernatural state ; and that, in His first act, the natural 
never stood alone, but it leaned, all perfect as it was, upon 
the supernatural. It was as if God did not like to let 
nature go, lest haply He should lose what He so dearly 
loved. This one fact seems to us the great fact of the 
whole of theology, coloring it all down to its lowest defi- 
nition, and marvellously illuminating, from beneath, the 
character and beauty of our Creator. It is a hidden sun- 
shine in our minds, better than this outer sunshine that is 
round us now. 0, surely, to be a creature is a joyous 
thing ! and even our very nothingness is dear to us, as we 
think of God ; for it seems to be almost a grandeur, instead 
of an abasement, to have been thus called out of nothing 
by such an One as He. 

We are creatures. What is it to be a creature? Before 
the sun sets in the red west, let us try to have an answer 
to our question. We find ourselves in existence to-day, 
amid this beautiful scene, with multitudes of our fellow- 

guantur. Nos autem habemus duplicera coDJunctioneui cum Deo. Una est 
quantum ad bona naturae, alia quantum ad beatitudinem. Secundum primam 
comniunicationem ad Deum, est amicitia naturalis. Secundum vero commu- 
Dicationem secundam est amor charitatis. Ad 1 ad Corinth xiii. 4. 



48 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

creatures round about us. We have been alive and on the 
earth so many years, so many months, so many weeks, so 
many days, so many hours. At such and such a time vre 
came to the use of reason ; but at such an age and in such 
a way, that we clearly did not confer our reason upon our- 
selves. But here we are to-day, not only with a reason, 
but with a character of our own, and fulfilling a destiny 
in some appointed station in life. We know nothing of 
what has gone before us, except some little of the exterior 
of the past, which history or tradition or family records 
have told us of. We do not doubt that the sun and the 
moon, the planets and the stars, the blue skies and the four 
winds, the wide green seas and the fruitful earth, were 
before our time ; indeed, before the time of man at all. 
Science unriddles mysterious things about them ; but all 
additional light seems only to darken and to deepen our 
real ignorance. 

So is it with the creature man. He finds himself in 
existence — an existence which he did not give to himself. 
He knows next to nothing of what has gone before; and 
absolutely nothing of what is to come, except so far as his 
Creator is pleased to reveal it to him supernaturally. And 
thus it comes to pass, that he knows better what will happen 
to him in the world to come, than what will be his fortune 
here. He knows nothing of what is to happen to himself 
on earth. Whether his future years will be happy or sor- 
rowful, whether he will rise or fall, whether he will be well 
or ailing, he knows not. It is not in his own hands, nei- 
ther is it before his eyes. If you ask him the particular 
and special end which he is to fulfil in his life ; what the 
peculiar gift or good which he was called into being to 
confer upon his fellow-men ; what the exact place and 
position which he was to fill in the great social whole ; 
he cannot tell you. It has not been told to him. The 
chances are, with him as with most men, that he will 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 49 

die and yet not know it. And why? Because he is a 
creature. 

His being born was a tremendous act. Yet it was not 
his own. It has entangled him in quantities of difficult 
problems, and implicated him in numberless important 
responsibilities. In fact, he has in him an absolute inevi- 
table necessity either of endless joy or of endless misery; 
though he is free to choose between the two. Annihila- 
tion he is not free to choose. Reach out into the on-coming 
eternity as far as the fancy can, there still will this man 
be, simply because he has been already born. The con- 
sequences of his birth are not only unspeakable in their 
magnitude, they are simply eternal. Yet he was not con- 
sulted about his own birth. He was not offered the choice 
of being or not being. Mercy required that he should not 
be offered it; justice did not require that he should. We 
are not concerned now to defend God. We are only stating 
facts, and taking the facts as we find them. It is a fact, 
that he was not consulted about his own birth ; and it is 
truer and higher than all facts, that God can do nothing 
but what is blessedly, beautifully right. A creature has 
no right to be consulted about his own creation ; and for 
this reason simply, that he is a creature. 

He has no notion why it was that his particular soul 
rather than any other soul, was called into being, and put 
into his place. Not only can he conceive a soul far more 
noble and devout than his, but he sees, as he thinks, pecu- 
liar deficiencies in himself, in some measure disqualifying 
him for the actual position in which God has placed him. 
And how can he account for this? Yet God must be 
right. And his own liberty, too, must be very broad, and 
strong, and responsible. He clearly has a work to do, and 
came here simply to do it ; and it is equally clear, that if 
God will not work with him against his own will, he also 
cannot work without God. Every step which a creature 
4 E 



50 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

takes, when he has once been created, increases his depend- 
ence upon his Creator. He belonged utterly to God by 
creation : if words would enable us to say it, he belongs 
still more utterly to God by preservation. In a word, the 
creature becomes more completely, more thoroughly, more 
significantly a creature, every moment that his created life 
is continued to him. This is, in fact, his true blessedness 
— to be ever more and more enclosed in the hand of God 
who made him. The Creator^s hand is the creature's 
home. 

As he was not consulted about his coming into the 
world, so neither is he consulted about his going out of it. 
He does not believe he is going to remain always on earth. 
He is satisfied that the contrary will be the case. He 
knows that he will come to an end of this life, without 
ceasing to live. He is aware that he will end this life with 
more or less of pain, pain without a parallel, pain like no 
other pain, and most likely very terrible pain. For though 
the act of dying is itself probably painless, yet it has for 
the most part to be reached through pain. Death will 
throw open to him the gates of another world, and will be 
the beginning to him of far more solemn and more wonder- 
ful actions than it has been his lot to perform on earth. 
Everything to him depends on his dying at the right time 
and in the right way. Yet he is not consulted about it. 
He is entitled to no kind of warning. No sort of choice 
is left him either of time or place or manner. It is true he 
may take his own life. But he had better not. His 
liberty is indeed very great, since this is left free to him. 
Yet suicide would not help him out of his difficulties. It 
only makes certain to him the worst that could be. He is 
only cutting ofi" his own chances; and by taking his life 
into his own hands he is rashly throwing himself out of his 
own hands in the most fatal way conceivable. One whose 
business it is to come when he is called, and to depart when 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 51 

he is bidden, and to have no reason given him either for 
his call or his dismissal, except such as he can gather from 
the character of his master, — such is man upon earth ; and 
he is so, because he is a creature. 

Is it childish to say all this? We fear we must say 
something more childish still. We must not omit to 
notice of this creature, this man, that he did not make the 
world he finds around him. He could not have done so, 
for lack of wisdom and of power. But it is not this we 
would dwell on. As a matter of fact he did not do so ; and 
therefore, as he did not make the world, it is not his world, 
but somebody else's. He can have no rights in it, but 
such as the proprietor may voluntarily make over to him 
in the way of gift. He can have no sovereignty over it, or 
any part of it, unless by a royal grace the true Sovereign 
has invested him with delegated powers. In himself there- 
fore he is without dominion. Dominion does not belong to 
him as a creature. Dominion is a different idea, and comes 
from another quarter. 

Furthermore — and we do not care whether it be from 
faith or reason, or from what proportion of both — this 
creature cannot resist the certainties that there is an un- 
seen world in which he is very much concerned. He is 
quite sure, nervously sure, that there are persons and 
things close to him, though unseen, which are of far 
greater import than what he sees. He believes in presences 
which are more intimate to him than any presence of ex- 
ternal things, nay, in one Presence which is more intimate 
to him than he is to his own self. Death is a flight away 
from earth, not a lying down a few feet beneath its sods ; 
it is a vigorous outburst of a new life, not a resting on a 
clay pillow from the wearyful toil of this. All things in 
him and around him are felt to be beginnings, and the cur- 
tains of the unseen world, as if lifted by the wind, wave 
ever and anon into his face, and cling to it like a mask, and 



52 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

he sees through, or thinks he sees. This is the kst thing 
we have to note of this man, as he sits upon the hill-top, 
in the sunshine, part and parcel of the creatures round 
about him. He finds himself in existence by the act of 
another. He knows nothing of what has gone before him, 
nothing of what is to happen to himself, and next to 
nothing of what is to come, and that little only by revela- 
tion. He was not consulted about his own birth, nor will 
he be about his death. He has to die out, and has nothing 
to do with the when or the how. He did not make the 
world he finds around him, and therefore it is not his. 
Neither can he resist the conviction that this world is for 
him only the porch of another and more magnificent 
temple of the Creator's majesty, wherein he will enter still 
further into the Creator's power, and learn that to be in the 
Creator's power is the creature's happiness. 

It is not our present business to explain or comment on 
all this, we are only concerned to state facts. This is the 
position of each one of us as men and creatures, the posi- 
tion wherein we find ourselves at any given moment in 
which we may choose to advert to ourselves and our cir- 
cumstances: and the fact that such is our position is no 
small help towards an answer to our question, What is it 
to be a creature ? But let us now advance a step further. 
Let us pass from the position of this creature to what we 
know to be his real history. Let us look at him on the hill- 
top, not merely in the sunshine of nature, but in the light 
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now we shall gain fresh 
knowledge about him, and understand him better. We 
shall know his meaning and his destiny, and can then 
infer from them his condition, his duties, and his respon- 
sibilities. 

He may occupy a very private position in the world. He 
may not be known beyond the sanctuary of his own family, 
or the limits of a moderate circle of acquaintances. The 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 53 

great things of the world have no reference to him, and 
public men do not consult him. He has his little world of 
hopes and fears, of joys and sadnesses, and strangers inter- 
meddle not with either. His light and his darkness are 
both his own. But he is a person of no consequence. Th-e 
earth, the nation, the shire, the village, go on without his 
interference. He is a man like the crowd of men, and is 
not noticeable in any other way. Yet the beginning of his 
history is a long way off. Far in the eternal mind of God, 
further than you can look, he is there. He has had his 
place there from eternity ; and before ever the w^orld was, 
he lay there with the light of God^s goodness around him, 
and the clearness of God's intentions upon him, and was 
the object of a distinct, transcending, and unfathomable 
love. There was more of power, of wisdom, and of good- 
ness in the love which God bore through eternity to that 
insignificant m.an, than we can conceive of, though we raise 
our imaginations to the greatest height of which they are 
capable. May we say it ? He was part of God's glory, of 
God's bliss, through all the unrevolving ages of a past 
eternity. The hanging up in heaven of those multitudes 
of brilliant worlds, the composition, the adornment, and 
the equipoise of their ponderous masses, all the marvels of 
inanimate material creation, all the unexplicable chemistry 
which is the world's life, were as nothing compared to the 
intense brooding of heavenly love, the compassionate ful- 
ness of divine predestination, over that single soul. Think 
of that, as he sits among the trees and shrubs, with the 
insects and the birds about him! So long as there has 
been a God, so long has that soul been the object of His 
knowledge and His love. Ever since the uncreated abyss 
of almighty love has been spread forth, there lay that soul 
gleaming on its bright waters. no wonder God is so 
patient with sinners, no wonder Jesus died for souls ! 
But this is not the whole of his real history. There 19 
e2 



54 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

more about him still. We do not know what the secrets 
of his conscience may be, nor whether he is in a state of 
grace, nor what might be God's judgment of him if He 
called him away at this moment. But whatever comes of 
these questions, it is a simple matter of fact that that man 
was part of the reason of the Incarnation of the Second 
Person of the Most Holy Trinity. He belongs to Jesus and 
was created for Jesus. He is part of his Saviour's property, 
and meant to adorn His kingdom. His body and his soul 
are both of them fashioned, in their degree, after the model 
of the Body and the Soul of the Word made flesh. His 
predestination flowed out from, and is enclosed in, the pre- 
destination of Jesus. He is the brother of his God, and 
has a divine right to call her mother who calls the Creator 
Son. He was foreseen in the decree of the Incarnation. 
The glory of his soul and the possibilities of his human 
heart entered as items into that huge sum of attractions 
which drew the Eternal Word to seek His delights among 
the sons of men, by assuming their created nature to His 
uncreated Person. His sins were partly the cause why the 
Precious Blood was shed ; and Jesus sufl'ered, died, rose 
again, and ascended for him, as completely as if he were the 
only one of his race that ever fell. There must be something 
very attractive in him for our Lord to have loved him thus 
steadily and thus ardently. You see that He counted that 
creature's sins over long and long ago. He saw them, as 
we blind men can never see them, singly and separately in 
all their unutterable horror and surpassing malice. Then 
He viewed them as a whole, perhaps thousands in number, 
and aggravated by almost every variety of circumstance of 
which human actions are capable. And nevertheless there 
w^as something in that man which so drew upon the love 
of the unspeakably holy God, that He determined to die for 
him, to satisfy, and over satisfy for all his sins, to merit for 
him a perfect sea of untold graces, and to beguile him by 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CRF:ATURE. 55 

the most self-sacrificing generosity to the happiness ot His 
divine embraces. All this was because that man was His 
creature. So you see what a history his has been, what a 
stir he has made in the world by having to do with the 
Incarnation, how he has been mixed up wdth eternal plans, 
and has helped to bring a seeming change over the ever- 
blessed and unchanging God ! Alas ! if it is hard to see 
good points in others, how much harder must it be for 
God to see good points in us, and yet how He loves 
us all ! 

But to return to our man, w^hoever he may be. It is of 
course true that God had a general purpose in the whole of 
creation, or to speak more truly, many general purposes. 
But it is also true that He had a special purpose in this 
man whom we are picturing to ourselves. The man came 
into the world to do something particular for God, to carry 
out some definite plan, to fulfil some one appointed end, 
which belongs to him in such a way that it does not belong 
to other men. There is a peculiar service, a distinct glory, 
which God desires to have from that man, different from 
the service and the glory of any other man in the world ; 
and- the man's dignity and happiness will result from his 
giving God that service and glory, and no other. As he 
did not make himself, so neither can he give himself his 
own vocation. He does not know what special function it 
has fallen to him to perform in the immense scheme and 
gigantic world of his Creator ; but it is not the less true 
that he has such a special function. Life as it unfolds wnll 
bring it to him. Years will lay his duty and his destiny 
at his door in parts successively. Perhaps on this side of 
the grave he may never see his work as an intelligible whole. 
It may be part of his work to be tried by this very obscu- 
rity. But with what a dignity it invests the man, to know 
of him that, as God chose his particular soul at the moment 
of its creation rather than countless other possible and 



56 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

nobler souls, so does He vouchsafe to be dependent on this 
single man for a glory and a love, which, if this man refuses 
it to Him, He will not get from any other man nor from all 
men put together ! God has an interest at stake, which 
depends exclusively on that single man: and it is in the 
man's power to frustrate this end, and millions do so. 
When we consider who, and how infinitely blessed, God is, 
is not this special destiny of each man a touching mystery ? 
How close it seems to bring the Creator and the creature ! 
And where is the dignity of the creature save in the love 
of the Creator ? 

Furthermore, this man, it would appear, might have 
been born at any hour of the day or night these last five 
thousand years and more. He might have been before 
Christ or after Him, and of any nation, rank or religion. 
His soul could have been called out of nothing at any mo- 
ment as easily as when it pleased God in fact to call it. 
But it pleased God to call it when He did, because that 
time, and no other time, suited the special end for which 
that man was to live. He was born, just when he was, for 
the sake of that particular purpose. He would have been 
too soon, had he been born earlier ; too late, if he had not 
been born as early. And in like manner will he die. An 
hour, a place, a manner of death are all fixed for him ; yet 
so as not in the least to interfere with his freedom. Every- 
thing is arranged with such a superabundance of mercy 
and indulgence, that he will not only die just when it fits 
in with the special work he has to do for God, and the 
special glory God is to have from him, but he will die at 
the one hour when it is safest and best for himself to die. 
The time, the place, the manner, and the pain of his death 
will be better for that man than any other time, place, 
manner, or pain would be. The most cruel-seeming death, 
if we could only see it, is a mercy which saves us from 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 57 

something worse, a boon of such magnitude as befits the 
liberality even of the Most High God. 

Once again : a particular eternity is laid out for that 
man, to be won by his own free correspondence to the exu- 
berant grace of his Creator. There is a brightness which 
may be his for ever, a distinct splendor and characteristic 
loveliness by which he may be one day known, admired, 
and loved amid the populous throngs of the great heaven. 
His own place is ready for him in the unutterable rest of 
everlasting joys. That man, who is gazing on the land- 
scape at his feet, has an inheritance before him, to which 
the united wealth of kings is poverty and vileness, A light, 
a beauty, a power, a wisdom, are laid up for him, to which 
all the wonders of the material creation are worse than 
tame, lower than uninteresting. He is earning them at 
this moment, by the acts of love which it seems as if the 
simple cheer of the sunshine were drawing out of his soul. 
They have a strange disproportionate proportion to his 
modest and obscure works on earth. God, and angels, and 
saints, are all busy with solicitous loving wisdom, to see 
that he does not miss his inheritance. His eternity is 
dependent on his answering the special end of his creation. 
Doubtless at this moment he has no clear idea of what his 
special work is ; doubtless it is one of such unimportance, 
according to human measures, that it will never lay any 
weight on the prosperity, or the laws, or the police of his 
county. His light is probably too dim to be visible even 
to his neighbourhood. Yet with it and because of it, he is 
one day to shine like ten thousand suns, far withdrawn 
within the peace of his satisfied and delighted God ! 

Such is the man's real history, traced onward from the 
hour when it pleased God to create his particular soul. And 
how many things there are in it to wonder at ! How great 
is the dignity, how incalculable the destinies of man ! All 
these things belong to him, not certainly in right of his 



58 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

being a creature, but at least because he is a creature. 
Creation explains all other mysteries. No wonder God 
should become man, in order to be with him, or should die 
for him, in order to save him. No wonder he should abide 
with him in mute reality in the tabernacle, to feed his soul, 
and to sustain him and keep alive His creature's love by 
His own silent company. No wonder the angels should 
cling about a man so fondly, nor that the one master-pas- 
sion of the saints should be the love of souls. The wonder 
is that God should have created man ; not that, having 
created him. He should love him so tenderly. Both are 
wonders ; but the first is the greater wonder, Eedemption 
does not follow from creation as a matter of course : but 
creation has so surprised us, that we are less surprised at 
new disclosures of the Creator's love. In truth man's 
dignity, wonderful as it is, is less a wonder than the creating 
love of God. How He holds His creature in his hand for 
ever ! How all things, dark as well as bright, are simply 
purposes of unutterable goodness and compassion ! How 
difficulties and problems are only places where love is so 
much deeper than common, that the eye cannot pierce it, 
nor the lines of our wisdom fathom it! of a truth God 
is indescribably good, and we feel that He is so whenever 
we remember that He made us ! What a joy it is to be 
altogether His, to belong to him, to feel our complete de- 
pendence upon Him, to lean our whole weight upon him, 
not only for the delight of feeling that He is so strong, but 
also that we are so weak, and therefore so need Him always 
and everywhere ! What liberty is like the sense of being 
encompassed with His sovereignty ! What a gladness that 
He is immense, so that we cannot escape from Him, omni- 
scient so that we are laid open and without a secret before 
Him, eternal so that we are in His sight but nothingness, 
nothingness that lives because He loves it! 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 59 

Something more is still required in order to complete our 
picture of the creature. We have represented his position, 
and have traced his real life ; but we have got to consider 
the condition in which he is as a creature. We shall have 
to plead guilty to a little repetition. The nature of our 
subject renders it unavoidable, and we must crave the 
reader's indulgence for it ! 

The first feature to be noticed in the condition of this 
creature man is his want of power. Not only is his health 
uncertain, but at his best estate his strength is very small. 
Brute matter resists him passively. He cannot lift great 
weights of it, nor dig deep into it. Even with the help of 
the most ingenious machinery and the united labor of 
multitudes he can do little but scratch the surface of the 
planet, without being able to alter the expression of one of 
its lineaments. Fire and water are both his masters. His 
prosperity is at the mercy of the weather. . Matter is 
baffling and ruining him somewhere on the earth at all 
hours of day and night. He has to struggle continually 
to maintain his position, and then maintains it with ex- 
ceeding difficulty. Considering how many thousands of 
years the race of man has inhabited the world, it is sur- 
prising how little control he has acquired over diseases, 
how little he knows of them, how much less he can do to 
alleviate ^hem. Even in his arts and sciences there are 
strangely few things which he can reduce to certainty. His 
knowledge is extremely limited, and is liable to the most 
humiliating errors and the most unexpected mistakes. He 
is in comparative ignorance of himself, of his thinking 
principle, of the processes of his immaterial soul, of the 
laws of its various faculties, or of the combinations of mind 
and matter. Metaphysics, which should rank next to reli- 
gion in the scale of sciences, are a proverb for confusion 
and obscurity. Infinite longings perpetually checked by a 
sense of feebleness, and circumscribed within the limits of a 



60 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

narrow prison, — this is a description of the highest and 
most aspiring moods of man. 

Such is the condition of our man if we look at him in his 
solitary dignity as lord of the creation. But even this is 
too favorable a representation of him. His solitary dignity 
is a mere imagination. On the contrary he is completely 
mixed up with the crowd of inferior creatures, and in num- 
berless ways dependent upon them. If left to himself the 
ponderous earth is simply useless to him. Its maternal 
bosom contains supplies of minerals and gases, which are 
meant for the daily sustaining of human life. Without 
them this man would die in torture in a few days ; and yet 
by no chemistry can he get hold of them himself and make 
them into food. He is simply dependent upon plants. 
They alone can make the earth nutritious to him, whether 
directly as food themselves, or indirectly by their support 
of animal life. And they do this by a multitude of hidden 
processes, many of which, perhaps the majority, are be- 
yond the explanation of human chemistiy. Thus he is 
at the mercy of the vegetable world. The grass that 
tops his grave, which fed him in his life, now feeds on him 
in turn. 

In like manner is he dependent upon the inferior ani- 
mals. Some give him strength to work with, some warm 
materials to clothe himself with, some their flesh to eat or 
their milk to drink. A vast proportion of mankind have 
to spend their time, their skill, their wealth, in waiting 
upon horses and cows and camels, as if they were their 
servants, building houses for them, supplying them with 
food, making their beds, washing and tending them as if 
they were children, and studying their comforts. More 
than half the men in the world are perhaps engrossed in 
uhis occupation at the present moment. Human families 
would break up, if the domestic animals ceased to be mem- 
bers of them. Then, as to the insect world, it gives us a 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 61 

sort of nervous trepidation to contemplate it. The numbers 
of insects, and their powers are so terrific, so absolutely 
irresistible, that they could sweep every living thing from 
the earth and devour us all within a week, as if they were 
the fiery breath of a destroying angel. We can hardly tell 
what holds the lightning-like speed of their prolific genera- 
tions in check. Birds of prey, intestine war, man's active 
hostility, — these, calculated at their highest, seem inade- 
quate to keep down the insect population, whose numbers 
and powers of annoyance yearly threaten to thrust us off 
our own planet. It is God Himself who puts an invisible 
bridle upon these countless and irresistible legions, which 
otherwise would lick us up like thirsty fire. 

What should we do without the sea? Earth and air 
would be useless, would be uninhabitable without it. There 
is not a year but the great deep is giving up to the investi- 
gations of our science unthought of secrets of its utility, 
and of our dependence upon it. Men are only beginning to 
learn the kind and gentle and philanthropic nature of that 
monster that seems so lawless and so wild. Our depend- 
ence on the air is no less complete. It makes our blood, 
and is the warmth of our human lives. Nay, would it be 
less bright or beautiful, if it allowed to escape from it, let 
us say, one gas, the carbonic acid, which forms but an infi- 
nitesimally small proportion of it, the gas on which all 
vegetation lives ? It exists in the air in quantities so trifling 
as to be with difficulty discernible ; yet, if it were breathed 
away, or if the sea drank it all in, or would not give back 
again what it drinks, in a few short hours the flowers would 
be lying withered and discolored on the ground, the mighty 
forests would curl up their myriad leaves, show their white 
sides, and then let them wither and fall. There would not 
be a blade of grass upon the earth. The animals would 
moan and faint, and famished men would rise upon each 
other, like the maddened victims of a shipwreck, in the fury 

F 



62 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE, 

of their ungovernable hunger. Within one short week the 
planet would roll on, bright in its glorious sunshine, and its 
mineral-colored plains speckled with the shadows of its 
beautiful clouds, but all in the grim silence of universal 
death. On what trembling balances of powers, on what 
delicate and almost imperceptible chemistries, does man's 
tenure of earth seem to rest ! Yes ! but beneath those 
gauzelike veils is the strong arm of the compassionate 
Eternal 1 

It would require a whole volume to trace the various ways 
in which man is dependent upon the inferior creatures. All 
the adaptations, of which different sciences speak, turn out 
upon examination to be so many dependencies of man on 
things which are beneath him. In material respects man 
is often inferior to his inferiors. But there is one feature 
in his dependency which does not concern his fellow-crea- 
tures, and on which it is of consequence to dwell. There 
is a peculiar kind of incompleteness about all he does, which 
disables him from concluding anything of himself, or unas- 
sisted. It is as if his arm was never quite long enough to 
reach his object, and God came in between him and his end 
to enable him to realize it. Man is ever falling, God ever 
saving ; the creature always on the point of being defeated, 
the Creator always coming to the rescue opportunely. Thus 
man plants the tree and waters it, but he cannot make it 
grow. He prepares his ground and enriches it, he sows his 
seed and weeds it; but he cannot govern the weather, or the 
insects, on which his harvest depends. Between his labor 
and his labor's reward, God has to intervene. When he 
lays his plans, he does nothing more than prepare favorable 
circumstances for the end which he desires. In war, in 
government, in education, in commerce, when he has done 
all, he has insured nothing. An element has to come in 
and to be waited for, without which he can have no results, 
and over which he has no control. Sometimes men call it 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 63 

fate or fortune, sometimes chance or accident. It is the 
final thing ; it is what completes the circle, or fires the train, 
or makes the parts into a whole. It is the interference of 
God, the action of His will. In every department of human 
life we discover this peculiarity, that of himself, that is, 
with means left at his own disposal, man can approach his 
end, but not attain it: he can get near it, but he cannot 
reach it. He is always too short by a little ; and the sup- 
plement of that littleness is as invariably the gratuitous 
Providence of God. Nothing throws more light than this 
on the question, What is it to be a creature ? 

All this is very common-place. Everybody knows it, has 
always known it, and never doubted it. True : yet see if, 
when all these things are strung together and presented to 
your mind, there does not rise up an almost unconscious 
feeling of exaggeration, nay, an almost outspoken charge 
of it against the statement of the case. This will be a test 
to you that you have not realized the case, that you have 
not taken it in, and, consequently, that you have something 
still to learn from facts which seem so undignifiedly fami- 
liar. For both the value of the lesson and its significance 
depend upon its strength. We cannot exaggerate the ab- 
jectness of the creature in itself, looked at as if it were 
apart from God, which happily it can never be, though it 
will be something like it when it is reprobate ; and then 
what more unspeakably abject than a lost soul? What we 
are always to feel, and never to forget, is that we are finite, 
dependent, imperfect ; that it is our nature to look up to 
some one higher, to lean on some one one stronger ; and 
that it is as unnatural for man to try to go alone and trust 
himself, as for a fish to live on the land, or a bird of the 
air in the flames of the fire. Dignity we have, and super- 
abundantly, and we ought never to forget it. But then we 
must remember also that the creature man has no dignity 
except in the love of Him who made him. 



64 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

But our real history adds a great deal to our condition, 
•which is full of important consequences. Man is not as he 
came forth at first from the hand of his Creator. He has 
fallen : and his fall is not merely an external disability, 
consequent on an historical fact so many thousand years 
old. He bears the marks of it in himself. He feels its 
effects in every moral act, in every intellectual process. He 
is the prey of an intestine vrarfare. Tvt^o conflicting laws 
alternate vrithin him. He has lost his balance, and finds it 
hard to keep the road. Notwithstanding the magnificent 
spiritual renewal which the mercy of his Creator has 
worked within him by the supernatural grace of a sacra- 
ment, each man has added to the common fall a special 
revolt of his own. Nay, most men have repeated, imitated, 
aggravated the act of their first father. They have fallen 
themselves, and their sin has been accompanied with pecu- 
liarly disabling circumstances of guilt. Then the unwea- 
ried compassion of the Creator has come forth with another 
sacrament to repair this personal wilful revolt of the poor 
fallen creature. With its grace fresh upon him, he has re- 
volted again, and then again. He has diversified his falls. 
He has multiplied his treasons by varying their kind. He 
has broken, not one, but numerous laws, as if to show that 
it was not the hardness of any particular precept, so much 
as the simple fact of being under God's yoke at all, which he 
found so unbearable. And again, and again, and again has 
the merciful sacrament repaired and absolved him, and grace 
goes on, with a brave patient kindness of its own, fighting 
against seemingly incorrigible habits of sin ; and, even at the 
hour of death, how reluctantly does mercy seem to capitulate 
to justice ! Now see how all this affects his condition as a 
creature. A man born under civil disabilities has no guilt 
in the eye of his country's laws, yet he does not take rank 
with a true citizen. A pardoned criminal to his last day 
will not cast the inferiority which he has brought upon 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 65 

himself. No pardon, no honors can ever cover the fact 
from others or himself. Nay, so far as he himself is con- 
cerned, they will only keep the fact bright and burnished 
in his mind. The man who has been tried and cast for 
nearly every crime in almost every court in the land, and 
who is at large by a simple and amazing act of royal cle- 
mency, must feel that he has made a condition for himself 
which he never can forget, and out of which he draws every 
hour peculiar motives of conduct and demeanor ; and the 
better man he is the less likely is he ever to forget his past. 
So surely it is with us men. If looked at without adver- 
tence to the original fall, or to our own fall, or to our re- 
newed falls after grace given, what are we but finite, de- 
pendent, imperfect: but when those three additional facts 
of our real history are added to our condition, how much 
more narrow and little, dependent and inferior, do we ap- 
pear to become ! The least word seems too big to express 
our littleness. 

But we can go lower still. Pardon lowers us. The 
abundance and frequency of mercy humbles us. The 
goodness of God gives a new life to the sense of our own 
misery and hatefulness. It quickens our knowledge of our 
own inferiority into a positive feeling of self-contempt. It 
is true that the first fall, and our own fall, and our re- 
peated falls, all flow, voluntary though they be, out of our 
necessary imperfections as creatures ; yet nevertheless they 
add something to the consciousness that we are creatures, 
just as all developments seem to add to their germ, even 
though, like sin, they are not inevitable but free develop- 
ments. And then God^s pardoning mercy adds again to 
our consciousness that we are creatures. It appears to 
sink us lower and lower in our own nothingness, to en- 
velope us more and more in the sense of our createdness. 
For in our sin God has condescended to make a covenant 
with us, and He is hourly fulfilling His share of it. On 
5 f2 



66 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

His part the covenant seems an abandonment of His own 
rights, a waiving of His own dignity, a service gratuitously 
given, or for a nominal payment which makes it less dig- 
nified than if it were gratuitous, a lowering of Himself 
towards our level, a series of apparent changes in Him 
who in His essence and knowledge and will is gloriously 
and majestically immutable. All this makes us feel more 
and more intensely what it is to be a creature. The con- 
sciousness that clung to the beautiful soul of the unfallen 
Adam becomes a deeper consciousness to the fallen sinner, 
and that deeper becomes deepest in the chastened joy and 
humbled peace of the forgiven sinner. 

Thus each of us finds himself in his place, his own al- 
lotted place, in nature and in grace, with this threefold 
consciousness upon him. Beneath the weight of this happy 
and salutary consciousness he has to work out his destiny. 
Criticism of his position is not only useless; so long as he 
remembers himself, it is impossible. Not only does he 
know in the abstract that all must be right ; he knows by 
his feeling of being a creature that all is right. To him 
criticism is not only loss of time; it is irreligion also. He 
does not know how to sit in judgment upon his Creator. 
He cannot comprehend even the mental process by which 
others do it, much less the moral temper. For, while he 
has this threefold consciousness that he is a creature, he 
cannot conceive of himself without it, nor what he would 
be like if he was without it, and therefore those who are 
without it are beyond his comprehension for the time, both 
in what they say and do. There are not two sides to the 
question of life, God's side and man's side. God's side is 
all in all. Not only is there nothing to be said on the 
other, there is no other. To think that man has a side is 
to forget that he is a creature, or at least not to realize 
what it is to be a creature. Encompass man's littleness 
with the grand irresponsible sovereignty of God, and then 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 67 

is he glorious indeed, his liberty large beyond compare, and 
his likeness to God more like an equality Tvith Him than 
•we can dare to put in words. 

Now let us go back to the man we left sitting on the hill- 
top in the brightness of the summer sun. We have to 
draw some conclusions about him from what has been 
already said; and the first is this. As ^^ creature^' is his 
name, his history, and his condition, he must obviously 
have the conduct and the virtues befitting a creature. He 
must behave as what he is. His propriety consists in his 
doing so. He must be made up of fear, of obedience, of 
submission, of humility, of prayer, of repentance, and 
above all, of love. As fire warms and frost chills, as the 
moon shines by night and the sun by day, as birds have 
wings and trees have leaves, so must man, as a creature, 
conduct himself as such, and do those virtuous actions, 
which are chiefly virtues because they are becoming to him 
and adapted to his condition. The demeanor, the be- 
havior, the excellencies of a creature must bear upon them 
the stamp of his created nature and condition. This is too 
obvious to need enforcing ; obvious when stated, yet most 
strangely forgotten by most men during the greater part 
of their lives. 

Our second conclusion about this man is that, whatever 
may be his attainments or his inclinations, the only know- 
ledge worth much of his time and trouble, the only science 
which will last with him and stand him in good stead, con- 
sists in his study of the character of God. He received 
everything from God. He belongs to Him. He is sur- 
rounded by Him. His fate is in God^s hands. His eternity 
is to be with God, in a companionship of unspeakable 
delights. Or if it is to be in exile from Him, it is the 
absence of God which will be the intolerableness of his 
misery. His own being implies God's being; and he exists, 
not for himself, but for God. Of what unspeakable im- 



b8 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

portance then is it for him to find out who God is, what 
sort of Being He is, what He likes apd what He dislikes, 
how He deals with His creatures and how He expects His 
creatures to deal with Him. Can his understanding be 
employed upon anything more exalted ? Is there any 
novelty equal to his daily fresh discoveries in the rich 
depths of the Divine Perfections ? Is there any person in 
the world whose ways and works are of such thrilling 
interest to him as those of the Three Uncreated Persons, 
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Is there any existing 
or possible things to be conceived or named one half so 
curious, one half so attractive, one half so exciting, as the 
adorable self-subsisting Essence of the Most High God ? 
no ! Obviously whatever that man may be thinking of now, 
he ought to be thinking of God. As long as he sits 
beneath the fragrant shadow of that pious thought, that he 
is a creature, so long will he feel that his one wise and de- 
lightful task, while he is a lodger among the mutable homes 
of this swift-footed planet, must be the study of his 
Creator's character. 

Our third conclusion is that, if God is to be the subject 
of the man's intellectual occupations, God must be equally 
the object of his moral conduct. God must have his whole 
heart as well as his whole mind. We have no doubt 
that man's soul is a perfect mine of practical energies, 
which the longest and most active life will not half work 
out. The muscle of the heart acts seventy times a minute 
for perhaps seventy years, and is not tired ; yet what is this 
to the activity of the soul ? He has far more energy in him 
than his neighbours are aware of, more than he suspects 
himself. He can do wonders with these energies if he con- 
centrates them on any object, whether it be pleasure, wealth, 
or power. Our conclusion implies that, while he may use 
his energies on any or all of those three things, he must 
concentrate them on God only, on the loving observance of 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 69 

his Creator's law. "VYe do not see what being a creature 
means, if it does not mean this ; though we know that there 
are creatures who have irrevocably determined not to do it, 
and their name is devil, a species they have created for 
themselves in order to escape as far as they can to the out- 
skirts of the creation of eternal power and love. Why be 
like them ? Why go after them ? Why not leave them to 
themselves, at the dreadful dismal pole of our Father's 
empire ? 

These three conclusions are inevitable results of that 
man's being a creature. If he does not intend to make 
them the law of his life, he has no business to be in the sun- 
shine. If he wants to be a god, let him make a world for 
himself. Ours is meant for creatures. Why is he turning 
all our bright and beautiful things to curse and darkness, 
all our sweet gifts to gall and wormwood ? What right has 
he to be lighting the fires of hell in his own heart at the 
beams of that grand loving sun ? A creature means "All 
for God.'' Holiness is an unselfing ourselves. To be a 
creature is to have a special intensified sonship, whose life 
and breath and being are nothing but the fervors of his 
filial love taking fire on his Father's bosom in the pressure 
of his Father's arms. The Sacred Humanity of the Eternal 
Son, beaming in the very central heart of the Ever-blessed 
Trinity, — that is the type, the meaning, the accomplishment, 
of the creature. 

If we take all the peculiarities of the creature and throw 
them into one, if we sum them all up and express them in 
the ordinary language of Christian doctrine, we should say 
that they came to this, — that as man was not his own be- 
ginning, so also he is not his own end. His end is God ; 
and man belies his own position as a creature whenever he 
swerves from this his sole true end. Every one knows what 
it is to have an end, and how much depends upon it. To 
change a man's end in life is to "change his whole life, to 



70 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

revolutionize his entire conduct. When he sees his aim 
distinctly before him, he uses his sagacity in planning to 
attain it, his courage in removing the obstacles which in- 
tervene, and his prudence in the selection of the means by 
which he is eventually to succeed. More or less consist- 
ently, and more or less incessantly, the man's mind and 
heart are occupied about his end. It forms his character, 
it possesses his imagination, it stimulates his intellect, it 
engrosses his affections, it absorbs his faults, it is his mea- 
sure of failure and success, it is ever tending to be his very 
standard of right and wrong. A creature, in that it is a 
creature, is like a falling stone. It seeks a centre, it 
travels to an end, irresistibly, impetuously. It is its law 
of life. Hence it is that the end gives the color to the 
creature's life, describes it, defines it, animates it, rules it. 
This is true of pleasure, of knowledge, of wealth, of power, 
of popularity, when they are sought as ends. They lay 
passionate hold upon a man, and make him their slave, and 
brand their mark all over him, and the whole world knows 
him to be theirs. But all this is still more true when man 
makes God, what God has already made Himself, his single 
and magnificent end. And how glorious are the results in 
his capacious soul ! To make God always our end is always 
to remember that we are creatures ; and to be a saint is 
always to make God our end. Hence to be a saint is 
always to remember and to act on the remembrance, that 
we are creatures. Yet, horrible as it sounds when it is put 
into words, it is the common way of men to make God a 
means instead of an end, a purveyor instead of a judge, if 
they make any use of Him at all. He has to forecast for 
their comforts, to supply their necessities, to pay for their 
luxuries. All men seek their own, murmured the indignant 
apostle. To seek the things of Christ was his romance, 
which worldly disciples did not understand. How few can 
turn round upon themselves at any given moment of life, 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 71 

when they do not happen to be engaged in spiritual exer- 
cises, and can say, *' God is my end. At this moment, when 
I unexpectedly look in upon myself, while I was acting 
almost unconsciously, I find that I was doing, what a crea- 
ture should always be doing, — seeking God. My worldly 
duties and social occupations were understood to be means 
only, and were treated accordingly. There was nothing in 
my mind and heart which partook of the dignity of an end 
except God.^' Yet is it not our simple business ? We ex- 
pect even a dog to come when he is called, and a clock to 
go when it is wound up ; and in like manner God, when He 
creates us, expects us to seek Him as our only end and 
sovereign good. 

We are almost frightened at what we have written. We 
covenanted not to speak of high things, nor entangle you in 
discourses of spiritual perfection : and we honestly do not 
intend to while you to commit yourselves to anything which 
is not common-place and necessary. Yet when we simply 
say what it is to be a creature, we seem to be demanding 
the highest sanctity. The creature seems to slip into the 
saint. The natural temper and disposition proper to us 
because of our created origin seems to put on the hue and 
likeness of supernatural grace and contemplation, and the 
common-place insensibly to glide into the heroic. There 
must be some mistake. Where is it? Our conscience tells 
us that we have been honorably checking ourselves a 
score of times in the last score pages, from saying what was 
burning in our heart to come out. It is not we that have 
broken faith with you, gentle reader. Have we then over- 
stated the case of the creature? Have we drawn any con- 
clusion without a premiss to warrant it ? Have we invented 
what does not exist, or falsely embellished what does ? The 
more we consider the case, the less we seem to have done 
so. We may have wearied you with telling you what was 
so old and trite — we do not think we Have told you any- 



72 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

thing new, or that there is any part of our statement from 
which you dissent. How then have we come to this pass ? 
Is it true that every one is obliged to be what is technically 
called a saint, or what theology styles perfect, simply be- 
cause he is a creature? we cannot say Yes, and yet we 
hardly dare say No. What if it be true that perfection is 
only the result of corresponding to grace as it is given, 
and thus that all good people are in the road to perfection 
always ; so that perfection is not one thing, and common 
holiness another ; but that common holiness is perfection in 
its childhood, and perfection is common holiness in its ma- 
turity. We will not say that this is so. But we will say 
thus much, that the simple statement of our position and 
condition as creatures brings us to this — that to serve God 
out of love is not the peculiar characteristic of what is 
termed high spirituality, but that, without reference to 
perfection, nay without reference to redemption, creation 
of and by itself does bind the creature to serve the Creator 
out of love ; and we confess that this conclusion is as preg- 
nant of consequences as it is inevitable in its truth. 

In the last chapter we said that a heathen, who without 
revelation should act consistently (if he could) with the 
constant remembrance that he was a creature, would, 
bating certain gifts and graces, be a portrait of a catholic 
saint. Now that we have examined more in detail the 
characteristics proper to a creature, and so the duties which 
become him, the same truth comes out still more clearly. 
What on a superficial view seems the peculiar excellence 
of high spirituality, namely, that in it God is served out of 
love, turns out to be a universal obligation undeniably 
founded on the simple fact of creation. Thus all practical 
religion is based upon a man^s behaving himself becomingly 
as a creature. It is the humility and modesty that come 
out of that thought which give to his actions all their grace- 
fulness and beauty, and commute them into worship and 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 73 

adoration. "When we seek for the first principles of holi- 
ness, we find them where the heathen finds the roots of his 
moral duties, and where asceticism and mysticism discover 
the axioms out of which they draw unerringly that vast 
series of amazing truths which theology records and classi- 
fies. These axioms are all implied in the fact of our crea- 
tion. They are the religious intuitions proper to a creature. 
Bind yourself to no more than on reflection you will ac- 
knowledge yourself to be bound to by the simple fact that 
God created you, and then you will become holy. It needs 
no more than that. 

If we examine the falls both of angels and men, we shall 
see that what lay at the root of them was a forgetfulness 
that they were creatures, or a perverse determination to be 
something more. Whether the angels contemplated their 
own beauty and rested with an unhallowed complacency in 
themselves as their end, or whether they would not bow to 
the divine counsel of the Incarnation and the exaltation of 
Christ^s human nature above their own, in both cases they 
forgot themselves as creatures, and demanded what it was 
not becoming in a creature to demand. You shall be as 
gods, was the very motive which the tempter urged in order 
to push man to his ruin. Man insisted upon sharing some- 
thing which it had pleased God for the time to reserve to 
Himself. The knowledge of God was the object of Adam's 
envy ; and so unsuitable was it for him as a creature, that, 
when he got it, it ceased to be science and turned into guilty 
shame. In both cases, it was not merely that the angels 
and man refused to obey their Creator ; they wanted them- 
selves to be more than creatures. They would not acquiesce 
in their created position. Can anything show more plainly 
the importance of keeping always before us the fact that 
we are creatures ? 

Yes ! we may go still higher. We say of our Blessed 

G 



74 WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 

Lord that He is our example as well as our mediator. Yet 
He was God as well as man. What is this then but saying 
that of such consequence was it to the happiness of man 
that he should know how to behave himself as a creature, 
that it was necessary the Creator should take a created na- 
ture, and come Himself to show him how to wear it ? Thus 
one of the many known reasons of the sublime mystery of 
the Incarnation was that the Creator Himself might show 
the creature how he should behave as a creature. What 
interest does not this throw upon the minutest incidents 
and most rapid graphic allusions of the Four Gospels? The 
mysteries of Jesus are man's studies of the beauty of holi- 
ness. His soul drinks beauty out of them, and so is imper- 
ceptibly transformed into the likeness of God made man. 
He takes the form and the hue of the Incarnate Word. 

If we turn from our Lord's example to His work for us 
as our mediator, the same truth meets us in another shape. 
Not only was His created nature necessary for this office in 
the counsels of God, but especial stress is laid upon those 
things which are eminently characteristic of a created na- 
ture as created. Speaking of His intercession the apostle 
says that *'in the days of His flesh He was heard because 
He feared,^^ and again He speaks of the Crucifixion in the 
same way, *'He was obedient unto death, even the death 
of the Cross.^' It is as if Jesus redeemed the world espe- 
cially by acknowledging in an infinitely meritorious manner 
through His created nature the sovereignty and dominion 
of the Creator. 

To sum up briefly the results of this chapter, it appears, 
that to be a creature is a very peculiar and cognizable thing, 
that it gives birth to a whole set of duties, obligations, vir- 
tues and proprieties, that it implies a certain history past 
and future, and a certain present condition, that on it are 
founded all our relations to God, and therefore all our prac- 



WHAT IT IS TO BE A CREATURE. 75 

tical religion, and that it involves in its own self, without 
reference to any additional mercies, the precise obligation 
of loving our Creator supremely as our sole end, and of 
serving Him from the motive of love. Thus, as w^e may 
say to the misbeliever that he would be a catholic if he only 
had an intelligent apprehension of the mystery of creation, 
so we may say to the catholic that he would be more like a 
saint, if he only understood with his mind and felt in his 
heart, what it was to be a creature. 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 



CHAPTER III. 

WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

Debemus intelligere ut amemus, non vero amare ut intelligamus. 

S. Anselm, 

As creatures we are ourselves surrounded with creatures 
in the world. Above us and beneath us and around us 
there are creatures, of manifold sorts and of varying de- 
grees of beauty. The earth beneath our feet, and the vast 
sidereal spaces above us, are all teemiog with created 
things. When we come to reflect upon them, we are almost 
bewildered with their number and diversity, on the earth, 
in the water, and in the air, visible and invisible, known to 
science or unknown. Then theology teaches us that we 
are lying in the mighty bosom of another world of spiritual 
creatures, whom we do not see, and yet with whom we are 
in hourly relations of brotherhood and love. The realms 
of spirit encompass us with their unimaginable distances, 
and interpenetrate in all directions our material worlds. 
Creation is populous with angels. They are the living laws 
of the material world, the wise and potent movers of the 
wheeling spheres. All night and day they bear us com- 
pany. They hold us by the hand and lead us on our way. 
They hear our words, and witness our most hidden acts. 
The secrets of our hearts are hardly ours ; for we let them 
transpire perpetually by external signs before the keen 
vision of the angels. Nay, have we not asked God to let 
our own angel see down into our hearts and know us 
thoroughly, so that he may guide us better with his affec- 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 77 

tlonate and surpassing skill? Because we are creatures, 
creatures exercise a peculiar influence over us. Love is 
stronger than the grave. Blood and family and country 
rule us with an almost resistless sway. We can so attach 
ourselves to an unreasoning animal as to love it beyond all 
bounds, and to weep when its bright little life is taken from 
us. The very trees and fields of our village, and the blue 
dreamy outline of our native hills, can so possess our souls 
as to sway them through a long life of travel or of money- 
making or of ambition. Alas ! we are so saturated with 
creatures, that we think even of our Creator under created 
symbols ; and God^s merciful condescensions seem to show 
that a material creature could hardly worship with a spi- 
ritual worship, until the Creator had kindly put on a 
created nature. Thus every report of the senses, every 
process of the mind, every form and figure in the soul's 
secret chambers of imagery, every action that goes but from 
us, every pulse of our natural life, the atoms of matter that 
circulate through us in swift and endless streams, clothing 
the soul with its garment of marvellous texture which is 
being woven and unwoven every hour, as swiftly as the 
changes on a dove's bright neck, — all of them imply crea- 
tures, are kindled by them, fed by them, lean upon them, 
and cannot for one moment be disentangled from them, 
except by some most rare process of supernatural grace. 
Our life seems inextricably mixed up with creatures, and, 
to use a metaphysical term, is unthinkable without them. 

How difficult then is it to conceive of a Life without 
creatures, a Life which was from everlasting without them, 
which needs them not, which mixes them not up with itself, 
to which they can add nothing, and from which they can 
take nothing ! We have to banish from our minds, or to 
attempt it, the ideas of time and space, of body and of mo- 
tion ; and even then the unimaginable void, which is not 
space, or the colorless light which is not body, is still a 

g2 



78; WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

created image built up of created notions. There is some- 
thing unutterably appalling in a Life eternally by itself, 
self-sufficing, its own glory, its own knowledge, its own 
magnificence, its own intense blessedness, its own silent, 
vast, unthrilling love. Surely to think of such a Life is to 
w^orship it. But It — it is not It — there were nothings 
then — it is Re, our God and our Creator ! Out of that 
Life we came, when the Life had spent an eternity without 
us. The Life needed us not, was none the happier because 
of us, ruled not over a wider empire through us, multiplied 
not in us the objects of omniscience. But the Life loved 
us, and therefore out of the Life we came, and from its 
glorious sun-bright fountains have filled the tiny vases of 
our created lives. how the sublimity of this faith at once 
nourishes our souls like food and recreates the mind like 
rest ! Of how many illusions ought it not in its magnifi- 
cent simplicity to disabuse us ! The very idea of the Life 
of God before ever the worlds were made must of necessity 
give a tone and a color, impart a meaning, and impress a 
character upon our own lives, which they would not other- 
wise have had. It furnishes us with a measure of the true 
magnitudes of things which teaches us how and what to 
hate and despise, and how and what to love and esteem. 
To put the thought into easier words, we cannot fully know 
what it is to be a creature, until we know as fully as we 
can what it is to have a Creator. 

It is the peculiar beauty of the Old Testament that it 
brings out this truth to us in the most forcible and attrac- 
tive manner. This is probably the secret of the hold 
which it lays of the minds of those who have become 
familiar with it in early youth, and of the deep basis of re- 
ligious feeling which it seems toplant in them. Though it 
is made up of various books, differing in date, and scene, 
and style, though psalm and prophecy and moral strains 
mingle with history and biography, every one feels that it 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 79 

has, almost as completely as the New Testament, one 
spirit, one tone, one color, one scope. Whether it is when 
Adam and Eve are doing penance in Asia, and Cain is 
wandering out on the great homeless earth, or whether it 
is in the patriarch's tent beneath the starry skies of Meso- 
potamia, or amid the brick fields of the Nile, or the silent 
glens of stern Sinai, or during the rough chivalric days of 
the Judges, or in the palaces of Jerusalem, or by the waters 
of the captivity, whether it be when Debbora is chanting 
beneath her palm, or the king of Israel is singing to his 
harp, or amid the allegorical actions of some wailing pro- 
phet, or the conversations of the wise men of the Stony 
Arabia, we are ever learning what it is to be a creature, 
and what it is to have a Creator. We are being taught 
the character of the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of 
Jacob, the God that was not like the gods of the heathen. 
We either see or hear what He desires of us, how He will 
treat us, the ways, so unlike human ways, in which He 
loves us and will show His love, His style of punishment, 
His manifold devices of mercy, what he meant human life 
to be, and how men were to use both each other and the 
earth which He had given them to farm. We do not know 
why it is that a tale, the like of which in common history 
would barely interest us, should fascinate us in the words 
of inspiration, why ordinary things should seem sacred 
because they are related there, and why simple expressions 
should have a latent spell within them enabling them to 
fix themselves deep in our souls, to be the germs of a strong 
and dutiful devotion through a long life, and then be a 
helpful power to us in death. It is because it is all so 
possessed with God. The true humble pathetic genius of 
a creature comes into our souls, and masters them. The 
knowledge of God becomes almost a personal familiarity 
with Ilim, and the thought of Him grows into the sight of 
Him. Look at the fathers of the desert and the elder saints 



80 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

of the catholic church, and see what giants of holiness they 
were, whose daily food was in the mysterious simplicity 
of the Sacred Scriptures ! The Holy Book lies like a bunch 
of myrrh in the bosom of the Church, a power of sanctifi- 
cation like to which, in kind or in degree, there is no 
other, except the sacraments of the Precious Blood. 

It would not be easy to throw into words the exact result 
of the knowledge of God which the Bible infuses into us. 
It is hard to fasten and confine in terms the idea of a 
Creator. When we try to do so, something seems to 
escape, to evaporate, to refuse to go into words ; and it is 
just that somethiug, as we are conscious, wherein most of 
the power and beauty of the idea reside. Just as we may 
find it hard to describe the character of our earthly mother, 
to refine upon her peculiarities, to select her prominent 
and distinguishing traits, and yet we have an idea of her 
so distinct that we see her more plainly and know her 
more thoroughly than any one else we love, so is it with our 
knowledge and love of God. AVe cannot look at Him as 
simply external to ourselves. Things have passed between 
us ; secret relationships are established ; fond ties are 
knitted ; thrilling endearments have been exchanged ; there 
are memories of forgivenesses full of tenderness, and 
memories of punishments even yet more full of sweetness 
and of love ; there have been words said, which could never 
mean to others what they meant to us ; there have been 
looks which needed not words and were more than words ; 
there have been pressures of the hand years ago, but which 
tingle yet ; there are countless silent covenants between us, 
and with it all, such a conviction of His fidelity ! So that 
it is true to each one of us beyond our neighbors, as it was 
true to the Israelites beyond other nations. Who is so great 
a God as our God, and who hath God so near ? 

We can therefore but try to express in cold and vague 
words the idea which a loving Christian heart has of the 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 81 

Creator. It is plain that our Creator is one who stands in 
a relation to us which has no parallel whatever among the 
relations which exist between ourselves and other creatures. 
It is not a question of degree ; it is one of kind also. It 
stands by itself, and we can compare it with nothing else. 
We cannot even understand it in its fulness. Do we know 
what the act of creating a soul out of nothing implies ? Do 
we comprehend the difference between being nothing and 
possessing an immortal life ? Do we fathom what it is to 
be loved eternally ? Do we quite take in what it is to in- 
terest God in our happiness, and to have Him employed 
about us ? Do we understand what it is that there should 
be the infinite and everlasting God, and also, beside Him, 
something which is not Himself? Yet unless we know all 
these things, we could not know what the relationship of 
creature and Creator involves. But we can easily perceive 
so much as this. Not only is the relationship between our 
Creator and ourselves unlike anything else, without parallel 
and beyond comparison, but it is far closer than any other 
tie of love by which the human soul can possibly be bound. 
He is obviously nearer to us than father or mother. We 
come more directly from Him than from them. We are 
more bound up with Him, and owe Him more. We cannot 
come of age with God, nor alter our position with Him. 
We cannot grow out of our dependence upon Him, nor 
leave the home of His right hand. The act of our creation 
is not done once for all, and then ceases. Preservation is 
but the continuance of creation, the non-interruption of the 
first act of divine power and love. The strong spirit of the 
highest angel needs the active concurrence of God every 
moment, lest it should fall back into its original nothing- 
ness. 

But not only is our relation to our Creator the closest of 
all relations, it is also the tenderest and the dearest. Nay 
its sweetness may almost be said to follow from its close- 
6 



82 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

ness ; for the closer the union, the more perfect should be 
the love. It is not within the power of God^s omnipotence, 
if we may speak so boldly, to make Himself otherwise than 
infinitely desirable to His creature. He is in Himself so 
surpassingly beautiful, so attractively good, so unspeakably 
compassionate, that He must of necessity draw us towards 
Him. Even those, who of their own will are lost, struggle 
towards Him, in spite of their reluctant aversion, with all 
the might of their nature and with the burning thirst of 
an incessant desire. Whatever then is sweet, whatever is 
delightful, whatever is satisfying, in human love, parental 
or filial, conjugal or fraternal, is but a poor shadow of the 
love which enters into the tie between the Creator and the 
creature. Hence we are not surprised to find that this tie 
is so durable that it can never be broken. The child in 
heaven owes no allegiance to its earthly father, and like 
the saints, may be in glory far above him. In heaven 
there is no marrying nor giving in marriage. The resur- 
rection has emancipated all from every earthly bond. But 
it is not so with the relation between the creature and the 
Creator. Everywhere and always that remains the same. 
Nay, as the lapse of time is ever adding to the creature's 
debt, swelling the huge sum of his obligations for benefits 
received, opening out new reasons for dependence upon his 
Maker, and drawing him into still closer union with Him, 
we may even say that the tie is continually acquiring new 
strength, and is being drawn tighter instead of being re- 
laxed. It is God's unbounded love, rather than His im- 
mense magnificence, which makes Him ever new to us, and 
His beauty always a fresh surprise and a fresh delight. It 
is not only, to use the distinction of the psalm, the great- 
ness of His mercy, but it is the multitude of His mercies, 
which make our trust and confidence in Him so inexpres- 
sibly consoling, and our union with Him so far more inti- 
mate than any other tie of which we can conceive. We 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 83 

are one with Him, as our Lord prayed we might be, even 
as the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are One. 

If we endeavor to take to pieces the idea of a Creator, it 
may seem as if we were raising idle questions, and satisfy- 
ing a barren curiosity rather than ministering to solid 
edification. Yet it will not be found so in reality; and 
there is no other way by which we can get the idea clearly 
into our minds. If then w6 reflect attentively on the trains 
of pious thought excited in our minds when we meditate on 
God^s glorious and fatherly title of Creator, we shall find 
that there are at least nine difi'erent considerations involved 
in it, none of which we could spare without injuring the 
idea. 

When we meditate on our Blessed Lord's Passion, there 
is something lying unexpressed and only implicitly per- 
ceived under all our thoughts, and which gives to the 
difi'erent mysteries their peculiar attraction and solemnity. 
It is our faith in His Divinity. However exclusively we 
may seem to be occupied with His Sacred Humanity, we 
never in reality for a moment forget that He is God. So in 
like manner when we think of God as a Father or a Spouse, 
however much we appear to ourselves to be engrossed with 
the peculiar and special relationship in which He has been 
pleased to reveal Himself to us, our whole mind is in fact 
pervaded by the invisible thought that He is of a difi'erent 
nature from ourselves, that He is in truth God, and all that 
is implied in that blessed Name ; and it is just this which 
makes us thrill all over with joy and surprise as we venture 
to call Him by names which we could not have used with- 
out His permission, and which are only applicable to Him 
in a certain transcendental sense, which is rather to be felt 
than either spoken or conceived. The difi'erence of nature 
between Him and us, which faith never loses sight of, is 
the first element of the idea of a Creator, and one which 
pervades all the others. The Divine Nature is the grand 



84 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

thought which is the fruitful mother of all our thoughts ; 
and by the memory of it are all our memories magnified. 

But this leads us still further. For the difference between 
His Nature and ours is not like that which separates the 
angels from men, or men from the various tribes of animals 
below them. It is an infinite difference. And thus when 
we call Him Father or King, Shepherd or Friend, our lan- 
guage implies only a privilege which He allows to us, not 
any duties to which He is bound or rights to which we are 
entitled. We have no compact with God, except the un- 
merited enjoyment of His merciful indulgence. As our 
Creator His rights are simply unfathomable. He has no 
duties to us, nothing which can rigorously be called duties. 
He has made promises to us, and because He is God, He is 
faithful. But, as creatures, we have no claims. We are 
bound to Him, and bound by obligations of duty, and 
under penalties of tremendous severity. He on His part 
overwhelms us with the magnificent liberalities of His un- 
shacked love. Yet God is neither a slavemaster nor a 
despot, not only because of His infinite goodness and un- 
utterable sweetness, but because His rights are not limited 
like theirs. No creature can feel towards his fellow-crea- 
ture as we feel towards Him, in the grasp of whose omnipo- 
tence we are at once so helpless and so contented. Though 
the blaze of St. MichaePs beauty and power were able to 
put us to death, if we saw it in the flesh, we could never 
feel ourselves in his hands as we are in the hands of God. 
Though we are unable to imagine the risk we would not 
trust to Mary, our most dear and heavenly Mother, or to 
conceive anything which should weaken our confidence in 
her one atom, yet it is not in our power, it is not a possi- 
bility of our nature, provided we know what we are about, 
to trust her as we trust God, simply because His rights 
over us are illimitable. 

Hence also we never think of questioning the wisdom of 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVS A CREATOR. 85 

God, or His power, or His love. Our confidence in the 
worth of men is in a great measure proportioned to the de- 
gree in which we consider them pledged to us, whether by 
duty, by gratitude, by relationship, by honor, or by ne- 
cessity. Whereas it is just the reverse with our trust ia 
God. Our confidence in Him is boundless, because His 
sovereignty over us is boundless also. We have our doubts 
about holy persons : we criticise the saints : we take views 
about the angels. There is nothing in creation which we 
do not seem to have some sort of right to question. But 
with God it is not so. Here we are simple belief, implicit 
reliance, unhesitating dependence. We should be mad to 
have any other thoughts where He is concerned. 

Then, as we cannot question Him, we must take Him on 
faith. It does not perplex our dealings with Him, that we 
do not understand Him. His height above us does not ob- 
scure our perception of His sovereignty. We can. trust Him 
without knowing Him. We listen and obey, even when He 
gives no reasons ; for we know that we should possibly not 
appreciate His reasons if He gave them, and that no reasons 
could enhance our certainty that His orders are the perfec- 
tion of what is just and holy, compassionate and good. Our 
fellow-men must be reasonable, if they would govern us 
and use us for their purposes. But God's will is to us above 
all reason, more convincing than all argument, more per- 
suasive than any reward, because of the very infiniteness 
of His superiority over us. We take God on faith, because 
He is God ; and we take nothing else on faith except so far 
as we account it to represent God, either as His instrument, 
or His representative, or His likeness in goodness, in jus- 
tice, in fidelity, or in love. 

Thus, looking at our Creator as it were outside of our- 
selves, we form an idea of Him, and of our relations to 
Him, which can be accounted for only by His unspeakable 
eminence in power, in wisdom, and in goodness. The no- 

H 



86 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

thingness to which He has given life, and being, and His 
own image, has a secret bond to Him, which has more to 
do with its worship of Him than even His superlative ex- 
cellence and unimaginable glory. But the idea of a Creator 
is yet more singular, more isolated, more special, and more 
intimate. For we are never really outside of God nor He 
outside of us.^ He is more with us than we are with our- 
selves. The soul is less intimately in the body, than He is 
both in our bodies and our souls. He as it were flows into 
us, or we are in Him as the fish in the sea. We use God, 
if we may dare to say so, whenever we make an act of our 
will, and when we proceed to execute a purpose. He has 
not merely given us clearness of head, tenderness of heart, 
and strength of limb, as gifts which we may use indepen- 
dently of Him when once He has conferred them upon us. 
But He distinctly permits and actually concurs with every 
exercise of them in thinking, loving, or acting. This influx 
and concourse of God, as theologians style it, ought to give 
to us all our lives long the sensation of being in an awful 
sanctuary, where every sight and sound is one of worship. 
It gives a peculiar and terrific character to acts of sin. It 
is hard to see how levity even is not sacrilege. Everything 
is penetrated with God, while His inexpressible purity is 
all untainted, and His adorable simplicity unmingled with 
that which He so intimately pervades, enlightens, animates, 
and sustains. Our commonest actions, our lightest recrea- 
tions, the freedoms in which we most unbend, — all these 
things take place and are transacted, not so much on the 
earth and in the air, as in the bosom of the omnipresent 
God. 

Thus, when we use the words " dependence,^' " submis- 
sion, '' " helplessness,^' " confidence,'' about our relation to 
God, we are using words which, inasmuch as they express 

* Some writers, in avoiding pantheism, seem to deny one while omnipro 
sence, and another while providence. 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 87 

also certain relations in which we may possibly stand to our 
fellow-creatures, are really inadequate to express our posi- 
tion towards our Creator. We have no one word which can 
fully convey to the mind the utterness of that honorable 
abjection in which we lie before Him who made us. But 
this is not all. The liberality of God is not satisfied with 
pouring out upon us in such profusion the wonderful gifts 
of a reasonable nature, He enriches us still more nobly, He 
unites Himself to us still more intimately, by the yet more 
marvellous gifts of grace. Sanctifying grace is nothing 
less than a participation of the Divine Nature. If we try 
to think of this, we shall soon perceive that even imagina- 
tion cannot master the greatness and the depth of this stu- 
pendous gift, any more than it can sensibly detect the man- 
ner of its intimate existence within us, or the delicacy of 
its manifold and incessant operations when stirred by the 
impulses of actual grace within our souls. ** God,'' says 
Thauler,* " has created us for so high a degree of honor, 
that no creature could ever have dared to imagine that God 
would have chosen it for so great a glory ; and we ourselves 
are now unable to conceive how He could raise us higher 
than He has done. For, as He could not make us Gods by 
nature, a prerogative which can belong to Him alone. He 
has made us Gods by grace, in enabling us to possess with 
Him, in the union of an eternal love, one same beatitude, 
one same joy, one same kingdom.'' The fact that God 
created angels and men at first in a state of grace, and not 
merely in a state of nature, and then further that He heaps 
upon us now such an abundance of grace and makes us 
members of Himself by the Incarnation, causes us to feel 
that He did not create us to be simply His subjects and 
outside of Himself, but to be drawn up to Himself, to live 
with Him, to share His blessedness, nay, and His Nature, 
too. Moreover, our continual dependence upon grace, upon 

* Institut. cap. Tiii. 



88 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

gifts which are by no means due to us as creatures, but which 
are simply supernatural, compels us to acknowledge that 
we cannot even do the good we intensely desire to do, ex- 
cept by a sort of miraculous communion with Him ; and 
this gives to our dependence upon God another of its pecu- 
liar characteristics. 

But He is not only our first cause and fountain, not only 
our constant living preservation, not only the source of 
supernatural gifts and graces over and above the ornaments 
of our nature, not only Himself the original of which He 
vouchsafed to make us copies, but He is also our last end. 
xlnd He is so in two senses. He is our last end, because 
He is the reason of our existing at all, because it is for 
Him, for His own glory, that we live, and not in any way 
for our own sakes : and He is also our last end, because we 
go to Him, and rest nowhere but in Himself, not in any gifts 
which He gives us, but simply in His own living and ever- 
blessed Self. Our eternity reposes on Him, and is in Him, 
and with Him, and is the sight of Him, and His embrace. 
This is something which no creature, nor all creation to- 
gether, can share. It is the sole prerogative of God, and one 
which gives out a whole class of affections proper to itself. 
Nothing in life has any meaning, except as it draws us fur- 
ther into God, and presses us more closely to Him. The 
world is no better than a complication of awkward riddles, 
or a gloomy storehouse of disquieting mysteries, unless we 
look at it by the light of this simple truth, that the eternal 
God is blessedly the last and only end of every soul of 
man. Life as it runs out is daily letting us down into His 
Bosom ; and thus each day and hour is a step homeward, 
a danger over, a good secured. 

Hence it is, because God alone is our last end, that He 
alone never fails us. All else fails us but He. Alas ! how 
often is life but a succession of worn-out friendships ? 
Youth passes with its romance, and crowds whom we loved 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 89 

have drifted away from us. They have not been unfaithful 
to us, nor we to them. We have both but obeyed a law of 
life, and have exemplified a world-wide experience. The 
pressure of life has parted us. Then comes middle life, 
the grand season of cruel misunderstandings, as if reason 
were wantoning in its maturity, and by suspicions and cir- 
cumventions and constructions were putting to death our 
affections. All we love and lean upon fails us. We pass 
through a succession of acquaintanceships ; we tire out 
numberless friendships: we use up the kindness of kin- 
dred ; we drain to the dregs the confidence of our fellow- 
laborers ; there is a point beyond which we must not tres- 
pass on the forbearance of our neighbors. And so we drift 
on into the solitary havens of old age, to weary by our 
numberless wants the fidelity which deems it a religion to 
minister to our decay. And there we see that God has out- 
lived and outlasted all : the Friend who was never doubtful, 
the Partner who never suspected, the Acquaintance who 
loved us better, at least it seemed so, the more evil He knew 
of us, the Fellow-laborer who did our work for us as well as 
His own, and the Neighbour who thought He had never 
done enough for us, the sole Superior who was neither rude 
nor inconsiderate, the one Love that, unlike all created 
loves, was never cruel, exacting, precipitate, or overbearing. 
He has had patience with us, has believed in us, and has 
stood by us. What should we have done if we had not 
had Him ? All men have been liars ; even those who 
seemed saints broke down when our imperfections leaned 
on them, and wounded us, and the wound was poisoned ; 
but He has been faithful and true. On this account alone. 
He is to us what neither kinsman, friend, or fellow-laborei 
can be. 

The more deeply we enter into these plain truths, and the 
more assiduously we meditate upon them, the more we find 

h2 



90 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

growing over us a certain humility, which consists not so 
much in prostrating ourselves before the majesty of God, 
as in a kind of hatred of ourselves, which increases together 
with our increase in the love of God. It is not the contempt 
of our own vileness which follows after sin, and is a part 
of Christian repentance. It is not like that fresh burst of 
love to God, which follows when He has inflicted some just 
punishment upon us for our sins, and which turns our hearts 
with such exceeding tenderness towards Him. It is a sort 
of ignoring of our own claims and interests, a forgetting of 
ourselves because of the keenness of our remembrance of 
God, and an abandonment of our own cause for His : and 
all this with a sort of dislike of ourselves, of patient impa- 
tience with our own meanness, a pleasure in acknowledging 
our own unworthiness, like the pleasure of a contrite con- 
fession, a grateful wonder that God should treat us so differ- 
ently from what we deserve, and ultimately a desire to re- 
mind Him of our own self-abasement, of that intolerable 
demerit of ours, which He seems in His mercy so entirely 
to forget. In a word, self-abasement is the genius of a 
creature as a creature ; it is his most reasonable frame of 
mind : it is that which is true about* him when all else is 
false. 

Yet, in apparent contradiction to this self-hatred, the idea 
of our Creator is accompanied with a familiarity, for which 
it is difficult to account, but which seems an essential part 
of our filial piety towards our Heavenly Father. We can 
say to Him what we cannot say to our fellow-creatures. 
We can take liberties with Him, which in no wise impair 
our reverence. We are more at ease when only His eve is 
full upon us than when the gaze of men is fixed upon our 
actions. He misunderstands nothing. He takes no um- 
brage. He makes us at home with Him. Childlike sim- 
plicity is the only ceremonial of our most secret intercourse 
w^ith Him. His presence does not oppress our privacy. 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 91 

His knowledge of our nature, or rather our knowledge that 
He created it, gives us a kind of familiarity with Him, for 
it is a question of kind rather than of degree, such as we 
can never have with the great ones of the earth, nor even 
with those nearest and dearest to us. We could not bear 
to let our fellow creatures always see us. But nothing 
makes us common to God. He never — may we say it ? — 
loses His reverence for those whom He has deigned eter- 
nally to love. There is no need of concealment with Him, 
who sees through us, who regards the acknowledgment of 
our manifold weakness almost as acceptable worship of His 
majesty, and to whom our infirmities are His own laws, 
and our indignities but the timely exhibition of our 
needs. 

Such are the considerations which make up our idea of a 
Creator in our minds. They lie there implicitly. Some- 
times we realize them, sometimes not. Now one of them 
starts to view, and for a while occupies our thoughts, and 
now another. But on the whole this is what the idea 
comes to when it is analyzed. We think of Him as one 
who is not like our parents, because He is not of the same 
nature with us, of one whose rights are illimitable, and rest 
on no compact, of one whose wisdom, power, and love we 
may not question, and whom therefore we must take on 
faith, and trust, simply because of the infiniteness of His 
superiority ; of one who penetrates us with the influx of His 
omnipresence, and concurs with all our movements, who 
enlightens nature with grace, and as our last end recom- 
penses grace with glory ; to trust in whose never-failing 
faithfulness is as much a joy as it is a necessity, to love 
whom is to despise ourselves, and yet with whom we are 
on terms of mysterious intimacy far transcending the closest 
equalities and most unreproved freedoms of any human tie. 
This is our idea of a Creator; all these things seem to fol- 
low from our knowledge of that eternal Love, who saw us 



92 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

from the first, and when the time came, called us out of 
nothing.* 

To analyze our idea of a Creator is the first step towards 
answering the question we proposed to ourselves, what it is 

* Thus the delighted admission of the very ahsoluteness of God's sove- 
reignty over us seems to bring us to a more manifest equality, a more privi- 
leged intimacy with Him, than that view of God which represents the rela- 
tion of Creator and creature as a beautifully-just discharge of mutual obliga- 
tions, wherein He respects the charter He has given us, and we obey His laws 
as well as His knowledge of our weakness gives Him a right to expect. I 
have not a word to say of condemnation of that system of theology which 
endeavors to clear the relationship of Creator and creature of all difiiculty, 
and justifies God to man by representing Ilim as exercising over us a sort of 
limited sovereignty which fully satisfies our ideas of perfect equity, such 
equity as subsists between a powerful monarch and his subjects. But I am 
quite unable to receive such a system of belief into myself. A controversialist 
who makes out that there are no difficulties in revelation seems to me to prove 
too much ; for to say that a disclosure from an Infinite Mind to finite minds 
is all easy and straightforward, is almost to say that there is no such dis- 
closure, or that the one claiming to be so received is not divine. So in like 
manner, when we consider what it is to be a creature, and what it is to have 
a Creator, we cannot but suspect a theological system which represents our 
relations with our Creator as beset with no difficulties, and makes all our 
dealings with Him as smooth and intelligible as if they were between man 
and man. It makes me suspicious, because it proves so much, and this quite 
. irrespectively of any of its arguments in detail. There must be at the least 
a look of overbearing power, and an exhibition of justice unlike the fairness 
of human justice, or I shall not easily be persuaded that the case between 
God and man has been stated candidly or even quite reverently. It is indeed 
an act of love of God, as well as of our neighbour, to make religious difficul- 
ties plain; but he is a bold controversialist who in an age of general intelli- 
gence denies the existence of difficulties altogether, or even under-estimates 
their force ; and as the facts on man's side are too obvious to be glossed over, 
the temptation is almost irresistible to make free with God, and to strive to 
render Him more intelligible by lowering Him to human notions. In the 
long run this method of controversy must lead to unbelief. Most men are 
more satisfied by an honest admission of their difficulty than by an answer 
to it; few answers are complete, and common sense will never receive a 
religion which is represented as having no difficulties. It forfeits its cha- 
racter of being divine, by making such a claim. Religion, as such, cannot 
be attractive, unless it is also true : and when we are sure of the truth, we 
must not mind its looking unattractive, but trust it, as from God, and there- 
fore, as His, possessed of a secret of success which will carry it securely to 
its end. 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 93 

to have a Creator. We have now to take a further step. 
If our Creator is such as we have described, if the fact of 
His having condescended to create us puts Him in such a 
position towards us, what must the service of Him neces- 
sarily be to us His creatures ? The service of the Creator 
must obviously be the end and purpose of the creature. 
God is His own end : and He is ours also. Everything 
short of God is to the creature a means, not an end, some- 
thing transitory, and not permament, something in which 
at best he can have but a fitful joy, not a contented and 
blessed rest. The value of everything in life depends on 
its power to lead us to God by the shortest road. But as 
the service of God is the creature^s real work, so also is it 
his true dignity. The rank and pageantry of the world 
cannot clothe us with real dignity. To serve God is the only 
honor, which it is worth our while to strive after. The order 
of holiness is to the eyes of the enlightened angels the only 
authentic precedence in the world. So what is man's true 
dignity is also his greatest happiness. Oh we do not value 
as we ought our inestimable privilege of being allowed to 
worship God ! We do not prize our heavenly prerogative of 
being permitted to keep His commandments. We look at that 
as a struggle which is in truth a crown. We look at that as 
an obligation which is more properly a boon. We call it 
duty when its lawful name is right, the right of best-be- 
loved sons. Have not millions tried to be happy in some- 
thing which was not the service of their Creator, and how 
many of them have succeeded ? And did ever one crea- 
ture seek his happiness in God, and not find unspeakably 
more than he had ventured to conceive ? Why, the very 
austerity of the saint is more lighthearted than the gaiety 
of the worldling. So many men die in a minute the world 
over, and what is the last lesson of every one of them, but 
that the service of God is the highest happiness of man? 

But we talk of interest. Interest leads the world. It is 
self-love's god. It is strong enough to warp the stoutest 



94 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

mind, and to beat down the most romantic affections. All 
things give way to interest. The days of chivalry are past ; 
and perhaps when they were present, interest was as much 
the crowned king of society as it is now. Yet if the best 
interest, is that which is first of all most secure, and then 
most abundant, and after that most lasting, and finally to 
be gained with the least outlay, what interest can compare 
with our interest in serving God, and speculating only on 
His favor and fidelity ? We talk of wisdom also. These 
are days of wisdom. Knowledge covers the earth as the 
water covers the sea. Yet the prophecy is not fulfilled, for 
it is hardly the knowledge of God which abounds amongst 
us. But if that be the highest wisdom which sees furthest 
and clearest, which embraces the greatest number of truths, 
and the highest kind of truths, which contemplates them 
w'ith the most complete and accurate certainty, and which 
is of practical use to all eternity, then what earthly wisdom 
will compare with the wisdom of serving God ? How is it 
that we are so fascinated by the various sciences of mind 
and matter, and yet find theology so tame and dull ? Why 
is it that we are so excited by a new book on geology or 
chemistry, and turn away with weariness from the old- 
fashioned traditions of the Christian Church? Surely it is 
because we have no love of God, because we do not keep up 
our relations with Him as our Creator. Were it not so, we 
should find our modern sciences uninteresting in their de- 
tails and sterile in results, unless we ourselves make a 
theological commentary upon them as we read. 

Liberty is another idol of the sons of men, and one 
whose worship is of all false worships the least blame- 
worthy, although the greatest of crimes have been perpe- 
trated in its name. Yet what does our liberty amount to? 
Freedom of action, of speech, and of pen, are indeed noble 
achievements of civilization, and mighty missionaries of 
the Gospel too. Yet is a man really free who is not free 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 95 

from self? If he is a slave to base passions, or the tool of 
his own spite and malice, or the pander to his own criminal 
pursuits, or the victim of his own self-love, with what kind 
of liberty is he free ? If he is chained down to earth, then 
he is disabled for the liberty of heaven. If he has practi- 
cally sold himself to the evil angels, who is more a bonds- 
man than he? From Satan, w^orld, and self there is no 
liberty, but in the service of our Creator : and His service 
is liberty indeed, not only the truest and the sweetest, but 
the widest also. for the unconstrained spirit of the 
saints, who have cut off ail ties and snapped all bonds 
asunder, that they might fly away and be with Christ ! 

The service of the Creator is also the creature^s most 
enduring reality. The unreality of the world is an old 
story. It was told in Athens, before ever our Saviour 
preached in Palestine. It is a miserable thing to build on 
sand, or to give our money for that which is not bread. 
Yet it is what we are all of us doing all our lives long, ex- 
cept when we are loving God. Human love is a treachery 
and a delusion. It soon wears threadbare and we die of 
cold. Place and office slip from us, when our hands get 
old and numb, and cannot grasp them tight. Riches, says 
the Holy Ghost, make to themselves wings and fly away. 
Good health is certainly a boundless enjoyment ; but it is 
always giving w^ay beneath us, and our years of strength 
are after all but few, and our vigor seems to go when we 
need it most. But the service of God improves upon ac- 
quaintance, gives more than it promises, and after a little 
effort is nothing but rewards, and rewards w^hich endure 
fur evermore. 

But this is not all. Not only are all these things the 
truest, greatest, highest, wisest, best, widest, and most en- 
during dignity, happiness, interest, wisdom, liberty, and 
reality ; but the service of the Creator is the creature^s sole 
end, dignity, happiness, interest, wisdom, liberty, and 



96 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

reality. He has no other, none that have a right to the 
name, none that are not pretenders ; and he who seeks any 
other will never find them. However deliberate his evil 
choice, he will not gain earth by forfeiting heaven. If he 
works for Here, he will lose Here as well as Hereafter. 
Whereas if he works for Hereafter, he will gain Here as 
well. Moreover the service of the Creator is not only the 
creature's solitary end, dignity, happiness, interest, wis- 
dom, liberty, and reality ; but the opposite evils of all these 
things will flow from its neglect. In a word, unless we 
serve God, the world is a dismal, unmeaning, heart-break- 
ing wilderness, and life no more than an insoluble and un- 
profitable problem. look how cruel life is to the wicked 
man ! Take him at his best estate, reckon up the pains he 
takes, the efi"orts he makes, the activity he expends, how he 
is burnt up with the fever of insatiable desires, running a 
race after impossible ends, impoverishing heart and mind 
with excitements which are their own punishment ; what a 
tyranny the slow lapse of time is to him, what a bitter 
stepmother the world he has so adorned ! The flood-tide 
of irritation and then the ebb of helpless langor ; -who 
would live a life of which those are the incessant alterna- 
tions? The wilful sinner is but a man who in order to get 
rid of God explores, to his own cost, every species of dis- 
appointment, and nowhere finds contentment or repose. 

What is it that we have said? The service of the Crea- 
tor is the creature's last end, his true dignity, his greatest 
happiness, his best interest, his highest wisdom, his widest 
liberty, and his most enduring reality : the service of the 
Creator is, furthermore, the one solitary thing which 
answers truly to any of the above names : and lastly, from 
its neglect, the very opposites of dignity, happiness, interest, 
wisdom, liberty, and reality, follow to the creature, and 
the end of all is everlasting perdition. We are almost 
ashamed to write down such simple things, and to take up 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 97 

your time with reading a string of propositions which no 
one in his senses would dream of controverting. It is like 
printing the merest rudiments of Christian doctrine under 
a more pretentious title than that of a catechism. Yet, 
when we look at our past lives, perhaps our present lives, 
in the light of these elementary truths, it would seem as if 
they could never be stated too often, and as if there was no 
one, learned or simple, saint or sinner, to whom the state- 
ment of them was ever an unseasonable admonition or an 
unnecessary repetition. God has established His right to 
our service by so many other titles than than of creation, 
that self-love is able, almost unconsciously, to think more 
of those titles, the acknowledgment of which implies more 
faith and more generosity in us, and to dwell less on that 
which is at once the most self-evident, involves the com- 
pletest submission, and will not admit of more than one 
opinion. No one can exaggerate the extent to which God 
is ignored in His own world. It is a miserable fact, which 
is always a discovery, and is always new, because we see 
more of it every day of our lives. To the friends of God 
it is a growing unhappiness, because as they advance in 
holiness and know Him better, it seems to them less and 
less possible not to love Him with the most ardent, enthu- 
siastic, and exclusive love, and yet at the same time ex- 
perience is forcing upon them the unwelcome conviction 
that they know not one-tenth part of the wickedness of bad 
men, or of the criminal inadvertence of those who profess 
to acknowledge the sovereignty of God. The world has 
many trades and many tasks for its many sons ; but there 
is one daily labor which it seems to add to all of them, the 
effort to put away from its children the remembrance that 
they are creatures, in order that they may the more un- 
doubtingly forget that they have a Creator. blessed be 
the goodness of God, for giving us the grace to remember 
Ilim ; for out of that grace will all others come ; and thrice 
7 I 



98 WHAT IT IS TO HATE A CREATOR. 

blessed be His infinite compassion for the further grace of 
loving Him, and of yearning to make others love Him 
more ! 

It follows from what has been said that there cannot be 
much question as to the extent of our service of God, or the 
degree in which we are to serve Him. If He is our last 
end, then his service is that one thing needful of which our 
Lord spoke in the Gospel. With all our heart, with all our 
mind, with all our soul, and with all our strength — it 
must be thus, and only thus, that we should serve our 
Creator ; for any service short of this, or short of a real 
efi"ort to make it this, would be disloyalty to His infinite 
majesty and goodness. But in what way, or in what spirit, 
are we to serve God? This question also appears to be 
settled, without any further argument or appeal, by our 
own idea of what it is to have a Creator. It is plain that 
the kind of worship which we pay to Him must be some- 
thing of the following description. It must be an easy ser- 
vice, as w^ell because of His immense compassion as because 
of our unhappy weakness. It w^ould be doing a dishonor 
to His goodness to suppose He has made the way to His 
favour difficult, or that He does not efficaciously desire to 
save countless, countless multitudes of His fallen creatures. 
It would be an unfilial irreverence to our most dear and 
loving Creator to imagine that His service would not be 
easy and delightful. 

But it must not only be the easiest of services, it must 
be the noblest also. We must not offer to God except of 
our best. It must be the noblest, as for Him who is noble 
beyond word or thought, and it must be the noblest as 
ennobling us who serve Him and making us more like 
Himself. It must be the happiest of services. For what 
is God but infinite beatitude and eternal joy ? His life 
is joy. All that is bright and happy comes from Him. 
Were it not for Plim, there w^ould be no gladness, either in 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 99 

heaven or on earth. There can be nothing melancholy, 
nothing gloomy, nothing harsh, nothing unwilling, in our 
service of such a Father and Creator. Our worship must 
be happy in itself, happy in look and in expression, happy 
in blitheness and in promptitude and in beautiful decorum ; 
and it must also be such a worship, as while it gladdens 
the tenderness of God and glorifies His paternal fondness, 
shall also fill our souls with that abounding happiness in 
Him, which is our main strength in all well-doing and 
in all holy suffering. 

It must be a service also which calls out and occupies 
the whole of man. There mast not be a sense of our 
bodies, nor a faculty of our minds, nor an affection of our 
hearts, not a thing that we can do, nor a thing that we can 
suffer, but this service must be able to absorb it and trans- 
form it into itself. We must not only worship God always, 
but the whole of us must worship God. Our very distrac- 
tions must be worship, and we must have some kind of 
worship which will enable them so to be. Thus it must be 
an obvious service, one which at the very first sight shall 
strike a creature as reasonable and fitting ; and in order 
to be so, it must be such a service as a creature would wish 
to have rendered to himself. It must have that in it which 
alone makes any service graceful or acceptable. But as 
our wants are many, our feelings manifold, and our duties 
multiplied, our service of the Creator must be one which 
includes all possible services, expresses all our numerous 
relations with Him, satisfies all His claims upon us, at 
least in some degree, and has power to impetrate for us the 
many and various supplies of our diversified necessities. 

It must be a service also, which in a sense shall compre- 
hend God, and embrace the Incomprehensible. It must 
honor all His perfections, and all of them at once, even 
while it sees God, rather as Himself universal perfection, 
than as having any distinct perfections. It must not wor- 



100 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

ship His mercy to the detriment of His justice, or His sim- 
plicity to the injury of His beauty: it must not lose sight 
of His jealousy in His liberality, nor lightly esteem His 
sanctity because of His facility in pardoning. And it must 
settle all these difficulties in a practical way, the wisdom 
of which will be acknowledged as soon as it is stated, 
and which will not perplex our simple communion with 
God by subtleties and distinctions. It must be a service, 
whose direct effect must be union. It must have such a 
special power over the human soul, and at the same time 
so peculiarly prevail with God, as to join God and the soul 
together in the most mysterious and indissoluble union. 
For the creature tends to close union with the Creator, and 
union alone is the perfection of all true worship. Finally, 
this service or worship, as it is union, must last, and out- 
live, and take up into itself, and develop, and magnify all 
other graces. Moreover it must be something more than 
they are, something besides, which words cannot tell, but 
which will be an inconceivable and eternal gladness, 
brightening in our souls for ever more. 

Any service, either short of this or different from this, 
would plainly be unsuitable as an offering from the crea- 
ture to the Creator. It is implied in the very notion of 
creation ; for we cannot understand creation otherwise than 
as an act of eternal love. Our own idea of a Creator has 
already settled the question for us. We do not anticipate 
the least objection to any of the requirements specified 
above ; and numerous as they are, and differing in so many 
ways, there is one spirit, one worship, one temper, one act, 
one habit, one word, which at once satisfies all of them in 
the completest way possible to a finite creature. That one 
word is love. The creature cannot serve the Creator except 
with a service of love. Love is the soul of worship, the 
foundation of reverence, the life of good works, the remis- 
sion of sins, the increase of holiness, and the security of 



^YUAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 101 

final perseverance. Love meets the first of our require- 
ments ; for of all services it is the easiest. Its facility has 
passed into a proverb. It is also the noblest and the hap- 
piest of services, the noblest because it is the least mer- 
cenary, the happiest because it is the most voluntary. It 
is the only one which calls out and occupies the whole 
man ; and it is naturally a creature's obvious service ; for 
it is the only service which he would care to have rendered 
to himself. Love alone fulfils all the commandments at 
once, and is the perfection of all our duties. It is the only 
one which does not deny, or at least pretermit something 
in God. Fear, when exclusive, denies mercy, and fami- 
liarity weakens reverence, when the familiarity is not pro- 
foundly based on love ; whereas love settles the equalities 
and rights of all the attributes of God, enthrones them all, 
adores them all, and is nourished in exceeding gladness by 
them all. Love also, and alone, accomplishes union ; and 
while faith dawns into sight, and hope ends in everlasting 
contentment, love alone abides, as we said before, outliving, 
taking up into itself, developing, and magnifying all other 
graces, consummating at least that mystical oneness with 
God which the Saints have named Divine Espousals. 

Once more you must remember that we are not speaking 
of perfection, nor describing the heroism of the saints. 
We are saying nothing of voluntary austerities, nor of the 
love of sufi'ering, nor of the thirst for humiliations, nor of 
martyrdoms of charity, nor of silence under unjust accusa- 
tions, nor of a positive distaste for worldly things, nor of 
an impatience to be dissolved and be with Christ, nor of the 
hidden life, nor of the surrender of our own will by vows, 
nor of mortification of the judgment, nor of holy virginity, 
nor of evangelical poverty, nor of the supernatural myste- 
ries of the interior life, nor of the arduous and perilous 
paths of mystical contemplation. We are speaking only 
of what God has a right to, simply because He has created 

i2 



102 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

US, of what we cannot with decency refuse, of what com- 
mon sense alone convinces us, and of what we must be 
practical atheists if we venture to withhold. And yet it 
amounts to our making the service of God our sole end, 
dignity, happiness, wisdom, interest, liberty, and reality ; 
and to our devoting ourselves to it out of love as the most 
obvious as well as the only sufficient worship of our Crea- 
tor. Simple as the statement seems, and unanswerable as 
it is in all its details, it comes to far more than men will 
ordinarily allow ; and yet if it proves itself as soon as it is 
propounded, what can we conclude except that men will 
not think of God, and that they have so long neglected to 
think of Him, that they never for one moment suspect 
either how little they know of Him or how utterly they 
neglect Him ? 0! who has not seen many men and many 
women, gliding quietly down the waters of life, full of 
noble sentiments and generous impulses, kind and self-for- 
getting, brave and chivalrous, without one flaw of mean- 
ness in their character, ardent, delicate, faithful, forgiving, 
and considerate, and yet — almost without God in the world ; 
though we are sure they would be just the persons to 
adorn His faith and name, if only it occurred to them to 
advert to either of the two sides of that childish truth, that 
we are creatures, and that we have a Creator? 

In concluding this chapter, even at the peril of repeating, 
we must once more allude to the evils which follow from 
not realizing what it is to have a Creator. In the first 
place it introduces wrong notions into practical religion. 
It gives an erroneous view of the mutual relations between 
God and ourselves, and substitutes lower motives, where 
higher ones would be not only more religious, but more 
easy also. It destroys the paternal character of God, and 
makes His sanctity obscure His tenderness instead of illus- 
trating and adorning it. It leads us to look upon God as 
an independent power who has, as it were, come down 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 103 

upon us from without, and stands aloof from us, even while 
He governs us, and not as if we were from Him, and 
through Him, and in Him. It is as if He had conquered 
us rather than created us. Hence our submission is the 
submission of the conquered. We do not dispute His right 
of conquest, for our subjection is evidently complete, but 
we make the best terms we can with Him, and hold Him 
to the conditions on which we surrendered. It is as if His 
service were simply a sacrifice of ourselves to Him, an im- 
molation of ourselves to His surpassing glory, and not as 
if His interests were U9^ really the same as ours, His end, 
which is Himself, the same as ours, and our happiness 
wrapped up in His beatitude. It would be less unreason- 
able to look upon ourselves, if we could, as external to our- 
selves, as a foreign power with whom we were on a kind 
of armed neutrality, as an adverse interest to be suspected 
and watched, than to look upon God, as we must inevitably 
look upon Him, if we put out of view that He created us 
out of nothing. Dryness, weariness, reluctance, instabi- 
lity, and scantiness, in practical religion, are in a great 
measure the results of this forgetfulness that we have a 
Creator. 

Then again, has real piety a greater or a deadlier enemy 
than the popular ideas of enthusiasm ? If a person loses 
his taste for worldly amusements and blameless dissipa- 
tions, if he prefers the church to the theatre, early mass to 
lying in bed, almsgiving to fine dress, spiritual books to 
novels, visiting the poor to driving in the park, prayer to 
parties, he is forthwith set down as an enthusiast; and 
though people do not exactly know what enthusiasm is, yet 
they know that it is something inconceivably bad ; for it 
is something young people should be especially warned 
against, and above all pious people, as most needing such 
admonition. The mere word enthusiasm is a power in it- 
self; for it accuses, tries, condemns, and punishes a man 



104 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

all at once. Nothing can be more complete. Yet, in the 
first place, dear reader, look over your numerous acquain- 
tance ; and tell us — whatever may be your notion of re- 
ligious enthusiasm — did you ever knov^r any one injured by 
it ? You have heard that it makes people mad : did you 
ever have one of your own friends driven mad by it? And 
while you condemned their enthusiasm, did you ever yourself 
get quite rid of a feeling that, however unfit it was for life, it 
would be far from an undesirable state to die in? In the 
next place, what is enthusiasm ? Dr. Johnson tells us that 
it is a "vain belief of private revelations:^' did any of your 
devout friends dream that they had had private revelations ? 
It is " a heat of imagination •/' did not your friends seem 
to grow cold rather than hot ? Were they not often tempted 
to go your way because it was pleasanter? Did they not 
find it hard to persevere in spiritual practices, and did they 
not embrace them, not at all from any imagination hot or 
cold, but simply because they thought it right, and because 
grace had begun to change their tastes ? It is " an exalta- 
tion of ideas :'' now were not the ideas of your friends, in 
any true sense of the word, rather depressed than ex- 
alted? Were they not more humble, more submissive, 
more obliging ; and whenever they were not so, did you not 
distinctly feel that they were acting inconsistently with 
their religious profession ? Were any of their ideas in any 
sense exalted, even of those which had most to do with 
their pious practices ? Were not even these ideas rather 
subdued than exalted ? These are Dr. Johnson's three 
definitions. They will not suit you. Do you mean then by 
enthusiasm, doing too much for God? You would not like 
to say so. Do you mean doing it in the wrong way? But 
is daily mass wrong, is almsgiving wrong, are spiritual 
books wrong, is visiting the poor wrong, is prayer wrong? 
Or will you say it is doing them instead of other things, 
which are not sinful ? Well ! but is not this tyranny ? A 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 105 

man might answer, If an opera would be to me the most 
tiresome of penances, or a ball the most unendurable of 
wearinesses, why am I obliged to go? Or if I simply 
prefer prayer to the opera, or spiritual reading to the ball, 
why am I to have less liberty in gratifying my tastes than 
you in gratifying yours ? Do you mean that God spoils 
everything He touches, and is a mar-pleasure wherever 
He interferes ? The truth is that by enthusiasm men mean 
the being more religious than themselves. And this is an 
unpardonable offence ; for they are the standards of what is 
moderate, sober, rational, and reflective. Enthusiasm, in 
common parlance, has no other meaning. Whoever uses 
the word is simply making public confession of his own 
tepidity. Thus the whole popular standard of practical re- 
ligion is wrong and unfair, because it is fixed with reference 
to a false calculation ; and it is this Vv^hich leads to the 
popular fallacy about enthusiasm. If men realized more 
truly and more habitually what it is to have a Creator, and 
how much follows from that elementary truth as to the 
nature and amount of the service we owe Him, there can 
be no doubt they would assent to a far higher standard on 
the unsuspicious evidence of natural reason and common 
sense, than they will now concede to the arguments of 
spiritual books which are founded on higher motives, and 
appeal to a greater variety of considerations. The fact is 
that we only appreciate God\s goodness, in proportion as 
by His grace we become good ourselves ; and His goodness 
is so great and high and deep and broad, that it makes 
little impression upon the dulness of our spiritual sense, 
until it is quickened and sharpened with heavenly light. 
And thus, when we are low in grace, and unpractised in 
devotion, the simple truth that God is our Creator, and that 
a Creator necessarily implies what we have seen it implies, 
will come home to us with greater force, and make a more 
decided impression, than the complex consideration of the 



106 WHAT IT IS TO HATE A CREATOR. 

further and higher mercies which God has so multiplied 
upon us that they almost seem to hide one another's 
brightness. No man would accuse his neighbor of enthu- 
siasm, which is a practical endeavor to lower the standard 
of his religious practice, if he saw that his practice already 
fell short of what plain common sense and decency require 
from a creature. 

But it is remarkable that it is not only the great multi- 
tude of men who would find their account, and in truth a 
thorough reform, in dwelling more habitually on what it is 
to be a creature and what it is to have a Creator. This is 
one of the points in which the extremes of holiness meet, 
its rawest beginnings with its highest perfection. The 
tendency of the spiritual life, especially in its more ad- 
vanced stages, is to simplify the operations of the soul. 
The variety of considerations, the crowd of reasons, the 
number of heightening circumstances, the reduplicated 
motives which characterise the arduous work of meditation, 
give place to a more austere unity, and a more simple me- 
thod, and a more fixed sentiment in the loftier practice of 
divine contemplation. The multiplicity of lights, which 
filled us with a very trouble of sweetness at the first, grow 
pale before the one fixed ray of heavenly light which beams 
upon us as we approach the goal. Hence we find that one 
common-place truth, which would seem tame and trivial in 
our meditations, is enough to a saint for long hours of ec- 
static contemplation. This is the reason why we are so often 
surprised at the apparently exaggerated esteem in which 
the saints have held certain spiritual treatises, that we in 
our lower and duller state have condemned as spiritless, or 
prosy, or uninteresting. The book is but one half the work. 
The interior spirit of the reader is the other and the better 
half. And it is this last in which we fail. Thus the very 
truths which we are considering in this treatise, what it is 
to be a creature and what it is to have a Creator, have no 



WHAT IT IS TO UA\E A CREATOR. 107 

varied interest or exciting novelty, and yet it is just to these 
two elementary truths of Christian doctrine that the highest 
contemplatives return, with all the power of lifelong habits, 
and of intense prayer, with their intelligence purified by 
austerities which make us tremble, and with the seven gifts 
of the Holy Ghost, those mighty engines of spiritual enter- 
prise. Look at St. Francis Borgia, the saint of humility. 
It seems a less wonderful thing to raise the dead, than to 
spend, as he did, three hours daily in the absorbing and 
undistracted contemplation of his own nothingness. Is it 
easy to conceive how the three times sixty minutes were 
spent in the embrace of this single and so homely a truth ? 
One ascetical author tells us that it was when St. Francis 
of Assisi was at the very culminating point of his contem- 
plation that he cried out, " Who art Thou, Lord ! and who 
am I ? Thou art an abyss of essence, truth and glory, and 
I am an abyss of nothingness, vanity and miseries V^ Fa- 
ther Le Blanc tells us that chosen souls make much of this 
truth, and lay great stress on the meditation of it. The 
B. Angela of Foligno cried out in a loud voice, "0 unknown 
Nothingness ! unknown Nothingness ! I tell you with 
an entire certainty that the soul can have no better science 
than that of its own nothingness.^' Our Lord has Himself 
revealed His complacency in this practice of the saints. 
He said to St. Catherine of Siena, " Knowest thou, My 
daughter, who I am and who thou art ? Thou wilt attain 
blessedness by this knowledge. I am that I am, and thou 
art that which is not.'' St. Gertrude thought that of all 
God's miracles, the greatest was the fact that the earth con- 
tinued to endure such undeserving nothingness as hers. 

The common misapprehensions, which exist with regard 
to the doctrines of religious vocation, religious orders, and 
generally what is called priestcraft, may be enumerated 
also among the mischiefs resulting from the popular obli- 
vion of what it is to have a Creator. It would be difficult 



108 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

to exaggerate the fearfulness of hindering a true vocation, 
especially when we consider how often, not the perfection 
only, but the actual salvation of the soul is compromised 
by its disobedience to the call. The doctrine of vocation 
rests upon the fact that we are creatures. God has an ab- 
solute right to us. It is our business to be where He wants 
us, and occupied in the work He specifies, and we have no 
right to be anywhere else, or otherwise engaged. He has 
ways of making this special will and purpose known to us, 
w^hich are examined and approved by His church. Now 
relatives and others often talk and act as if the question 
were to be decided by their narrow views and individual 
tastes. They say too many people are going into convents 
in these days, and that domestic circles are being drained 
of all their piety. There are not enough secular priests, 
therefore for the present we must have no more monks. 
Active orders are suited to the genius of the day ; therefore 
contemplative vocations are to be discouraged. They not 
only overlook the question of the person^s own salvation, 
but they forget that the whole matter turns on a fact. Has 
God, or has He not, called that particular person to that 
particular order ? If He has not, then we must come to 
that negative decision in the way the church indicates. If 
He has, then there is no more to be said. In either case, 
all those views about orders, and the wants of the present 
day, are very dangerously beside the purpose. They may 
at last come to this ; na}^, they often have come to this : — 
God wants your brother or your sister in one definite place : 
you want them in another; and, taking advantage of the 
natural indecision of their free will, you have got your way, 
and beaten God. A bitter victory ! If forcing vocations 
is wanton work, and if touting for vocations is the male- 
diction of religious orders, there is hardly any account a 
man had not better take to his Creator's judgment than 
one Avhich is laden with the spoiling or the thwarting of a 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 109 

vocation. All this comes from not recognising the Creator's 
absolute right to His creature, and from not clearly per- 
ceiving that His will is the one only thing to be considered. 
The same may be said of the popular notions of priestcraft. 
It is enough to say of them, that they are never found apart 
from a dislike of the supernatural altogether, and an unea- 
siness and impatience of any interference on the part of 
God, or of any reference being made to Him. 

To the same forgetfulness of what it is to have a Creator 
may be attributed the wrong principles now so much in 
vogue, by which we regulate our intercourse with misbe- 
lievers. We look at them rather than at God, at their 
side of the question rather than His ; or it would be more 
true to say that we in reality do our best to betray their 
interests, because we do not look first at His. Those 
who realize what it is to be a creature and what it is to 
have a Creator, will never make light of any disturbance 
or interruption in the relations between the Creator and 
the creature. Every fraction of divine truth is worth more 
than all the world besides, and every rightful exercise of 
spiritual jurisdiction is of nobler and more lasting import 
than all the physical sciences will be when they have 
pushed their discoveries to the uttermost limits of their 
material empire. The spurious charity of modern times 
has stolen more converts from the church than any other 
cause. While it has deadened the zeal of the missionary, 
it has fortified the misbeliever in his darkness and untruth, 
and stunted or retarded in the convert that lively apprecia- 
tion of the value of the gift of faith, upon which it would 
appear that his spiritual advancement exclusively depends. 

The ancient fathers of the Church seemed to have looked 
in different ways at the two bodies of men which then lay 
outside the fold, the heathen and the heretics. They re- 
garded the heathen with horror, indeed, yet still rather 
with compassion than dislike. They contemplated them 



110 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

as their own future conquest, the raw material out of which 
by the preaching of the Gospel they were to build up an 
empire for their Lord. They were to them monsters of 
ignorance rather than monsters of perversity ; and with 
kindliness and yearning, they found no diflBiCulty in detest- 
ing the falsehood while they clung tenderly to those who 
were astray. But they looked on heretics in a very diffe- 
rent way. It was less easy to separate their errors from 
themselves. They had received the truth, and had cor- 
rupted it ; and a direct, schismatical, and personal hostility 
to the church actuated them. They had mixed the doctrine 
of devils with the pure Gospel. They had been guilty of 
personal treason to Jesus. As Judas was more odious than 
Pilate, so were they more hateful than the heathen. Hence, 
amidst all their charity and patience and sweetness, the 
elder Christians looked on heresy with a sternness of spirit 
which did not actuate them towards the heathen. St. John 
would not enter the building where Cerinthus was: we find 
no such thing recorded of him in his intercourse with those 
who worshipped Diana of the Ephesians. We have no 
difficulty in recognising the difference between the two 
cases, and in understanding the grave charity of the apos- 
tle of love. The whole truth, even when preached ungently 
and with forwardness, is a more converting thing than half 
the truth preached winningly, or an error condescended to 
out of the anxiety of mistaken love. 

We trust it will not seem a paradox to say, that the great 
mass and multitude of the English people are to be re- 
garded rather as heathen than as heretics, and are there- 
fore entitled to the more kindly view which the ancient 
fathers took of those without the fold. So far they are in 
better case than the heathen, because they possess, at the 
least implicitly, a belief in so many of the principal doc- 
trines of the Christian faith. The present generation, we 
epeak of them in the mass, have no determinate choice of 



WHAT IT IS TO HA YE A CREATOR. Ill 

error rather than truth, do self-will, no obstinate, perverse 
adherence to the principles of a sect. They have no per- 
sonal hostility to the church ; and the national war-cry of 
No Popery is no real proof to the contrary. Their reli- 
gious errors are the traditions of their forefathers, and they 
know no others. They know nothing of the catholic church. 
Their ideal church is very like it, though it falls below the 
reality. But the actual church they have been taught to 
believe is the enemy of God, and Jesus Christ, and the 
souls of men. They have no more notion that such a state 
of things exists on the surface of the earth as we know the 
inside of the catholic church to be, than they know how 
the angels spend their time, or what the glory of the third 
heaven is like. They look on us, as an old heathen did, 
who believed that Christians met early in the morning to 
slay infants and to eat their flesh ; and of such sort is their 
honest conviction. Furthermore the consequence of their 
misbelief has been a total misconception of God, a miscon- 
ception really rather than an ignoring of Him. They have 
the word God, and an idea attached to the word, and a 
sense which goes along with the idea ; but, if we may so 
speak, He is as much a different God from ours, as the old 
Christian's Father of our Lord Jesus Christ was from the 
Jupiter Tonans of the poor heathen, or the Primal Cause 
of the proud philosopher. Hence, while we can neither 
compromise nor conceal the truth, we may look with the 
kindest compassion on our fellow-countrymen, as our future 
conquest, as the raw materials for an ardent host of Chris- 
tians, as poor wanderers in darkness who want to be taught 
rather than controverted, and who above all things desire 
to have their sins forgiven, if they only knew the way. But 
one word, one look, which goes to show that being in the 
Church and being out of the Church are not as fearfully 
far asunder as light from darkness, as Christ from Belial, 
will rob God of more souls than a priest's life of preaching 



112 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

or a saint^s life of prayer has won. It is an old proverb 
that the worst of all corruptions and counterfeits is the 
corruption and counterfeit of that which is most excellent. 
If charity then, both in heaven and on earth, both for time 
and for eternity, is the most excellent of gifts, how sad must 
be the desolation, how wide the ruin, how incurable the 
wound, of spurious charity, which satisfies its own worth- 
less good-nature at the expense of God's truth and its neigh- 
bour's soul ? 

By far the greater number of objections which are urged 
against the catholic doctrines have their root in this oblivion 
of the respective positions of creature and Creator. And 
this is equally true of the difficulties which sometimes 
haunt and harass catholics themselves, and of difficulties 
which seem to prevent another from receiving the teaching 
of the church at all. If we remove from the objections 
urged against the Incarnation, or against the Blessed Sacra- 
ment, or against the doctrine of grace, all those which are 
founded in an inadequate view of God, or are derogatory 
to His perfections as reason represents them, or to His 
rights as implied in the very fact of His being our Creator, 
very little indeed will be left to answer. Neither would it 
be difficult to show that most of the misconceptions about 
catholic devotions and practices have their rise from the 
same copious fountain. All worldliness comes from it. 
Who would be worldly if he always remembered the world 
was God's world, not his ? And as to sin, it must of neces- 
sity be either a forgetfulness of what it is to have a Creator, 
or a revolt against Him. 

But — we speak now to more loving souls, — there is an- 
other mischief which comes from the same error. In all 
ages of the world it has been a temptation to good and 
thoughtful men, and the speculations of modern philosophy 
have perhaps now increased the number, to take inadequate 
views of God's love. Nothing is more fatal to the soul, nor 



WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 113 

more dishonorable to God. The world, with the sun extin- 
guished, and the hideous black moon whirling round our 
benighted planet, is but a feeble picture of what life be- 
comes to a susceptible conscience which puts God's love of 
man too low. Take what views we will of grace, it must 
come to this, that the immensity of God's love is our only- 
security. Because He is our Creator, He must love us ; 
His love must be immense ; He must efficaciously desire the 
salvation of every one of His rational creatures ; He must 
judge every single soul that maliciously eludes the embrace 
of his merciful longing, and escapes from Him into outer 
darkness ; He must do all but offer violence to our free will 
in order to save us ; His own glory must be in the multitude 
who are saved and in the completeness of their salvation. 
Xay, on our view as Scotists, He was incarnate because He 
was our Creator, and He is with us in the Blessed Sacra- 
ment because He is our Creator. Even if we take the 
Thomist view that the Incarnation and the Blessed Sacra- 
ment were a second love, and because of sin, that second 
love came out of the first love wherewith He created us out 
of nothing. True it is that we have no name for the feel- 
ing with which one must regard a being whom we have 
called out of nothing, we may call it paternal love, or by 
the name of any other angelic or human love ; and yet we 
know that it must be a feeling far transcending, in height,, 
and depth, and comprehensiveness, in kind, endurance, and 
degree, all loving ties which we can conceive. Surely when 
reason tells us all was meant in love, and that He who 
meant that love was God, we may well trust Him for de- 
tails which we cannot understand, or for apparent contra- 
dictions which should not make a son's heart fail or his 
head doubt. Oh ! uncertain and distrustful soul. God be 
with you in those not disloyal misgivings, which ailment 
of body or turn of mind seem to make in your case inevi- 
table. The mystery of Creation is the fountain of your 
8 k2 



114 WHAT IT IS TO HAVE A CREATOR. 

pains. As it has been your poison, so take it as youi 
remedy. Meditate long, meditate humbly, on what it is to 
have a Creator, and comfort will come at last. If broad 
daylight should never be yours on this side the grave, He 
will hold your feet in the twilight that they shall not 
stumble, and at last with all the more love, and all the more 
speed as well, He will fold you to His bosom who is Him- 
self the light eternal. 



BOOK II. 

%\t ^iiiUnltU& al CratibJ f ant. 



(1X5) 



THE 

CREATOR AND THE CREATURE. 



BOOK II. 

THE DimCULTIES OF CREATIVE LOVE. 



CHAPTER I. 

WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

Quid ergo tibi aeessit ad bonuia quod tu tibi es, etiamsi ista, vel om- 
nino nulla essent, vel informia remanerent, quae non ex indigentia 
fecisti, sed plenitudine bonitatis tuse ? — St. Augustin. 

A CHiLD^s first sight of the ocean is an era in his life. 
It is a new world without him, and it awakens a new world 
within him. There is no other novelty to be compared with 
it, and after life will bring nothing at all like it. A rapid 
multitude of questions rush upon the mind; yet the child 
is silent, as if he needed not an answer to any of them. 
They are beyond answering; and he feels that the sight 
itself satisfies him better than any answer. Those great 
bright outspread waters ! the idea of God is the only echo 
to them in his mind ; and now henceforth he is a different 
child, because he has seen the sea. 

So is it with us when we sit by the ocean of creative 
love. Questions throng upon us ; problems start up on all 
sides ; mysteries intersect each other. Yet so long as we 
are children, are childlike in heart and spirit, the questions 

(117) 



118 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

are not difficulties. Either they answer themselves, or they 
do not need an answer, like questions which are exclama- 
tions only; or we would rather not have an answer, lest 
peradventure some high thing should be lowered or some 
holy thing be made common. To gaze — to gaze is all we 
desire. The fact, that so much is mystery to us, is no 
trouble. It is love. That is enough. We trust it. "We 
would almost rather it was not made plainer. It might be 
darker if it were. Whereas now, though it is indistinct, 
it is tranquillizing also, like the beauty of a summer night. 
We have thoughts which cannot be put into words, but it 
seems to us as if they more than answered all difficulties. 
How the broad waters flow and shine, and how the many- 
headed waves leap up to the sun and sparkle, and then 
sink down into the depths again, yet not to rest; and, 
placid as the azure expanse appears, how evermore it 
thunders on the hard white sand, and fringes the coast 
with a bewitching silver mist ! Why should we ever stir 
from where we are ? To look on the sea seems better than 
to learn the science of its storms, the grandeur of its stead- 
fastness, or the many moods of its beautiful mutabilities. 
The heathen called the sea-spirit father. There was much 
in the thought. But v;hen we cease to be children and to 
be childlike, there is no more this simple enjoyment. We 
ask questions, not because we doubt, but because, when 
love is not all in all to us, we must have knowledge, or we 
chafe and pine. Then a cloud comes between the sun and 
the sea, and that expanse of love, which was an undefined 
beauty, a confused magnificence, now becomes black and 
ruffled, and breaks up into dark wheeling currents of pre- 
destination, or mountainous waves of divine anger and 
judicial vengeance; and the white surf tells us of many 
a sunken reef, where we had seen nothing but a smooth 
and glossy azure plain, rocking gently to and fro, as un- 
.ruffled as a silken banner. 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 119 

We shall be children once again, and on the same shore, 
and we shall then never leave it more, and we shall see 
down into the crystal depths of this creative love, and its 
wide waters will be the breadth and measure of our joy, 
and its glancing splendor will be the light of our eternal 
life, and its soft thunder will be the endless, solemn, thrill- 
ing music of our beatitude. happy we ! but we must be 
changed first of all, and perchance by fire ! 

But we must not altogether cease to be childlike, when 
we begin to ask and answer questions. Pride can under- 
stand nothing about God. We may question, then, but it 
must be in faith and trust and love, content with half an 
answer when more cannot be given, and to be left without 
answer at all, when the heights of God's goodness soar 
beyond all vision but that of faith, whose prerogative it is, 
in some sense, to equal and to comprehend its Giver and 
its Author. 

"We have endeavored, so far, to get some idea of what it 
is to be a creature, and of what it is to have a Creator ; 
and it seems to have taken many words to explain those 
simple things. Our next step must be to ask and answer, 
as well as we can, five questions which concern so many 
wonders of Divine Lore ; and we shall then be in a con- 
dition to examine certain phenomena in the actual life of 
the world, which seem at variance with our doctrines. 
Thus, speaking generally, the present treatise may be said 
to have three parts. The first, which stated the case, and 
which was concluded in the last chapter: the second, which 
is concerned with the five mysteries of the relation between 
the Creator and the creature, and which will occupy this 
and the next four chapters : and the third, which deals 
with certain objections from the state of things in the 
world, and which will occupy the ninth, tenth, and eleventh 
chapters. After which, nothing will be left but to close 
the work, and leave it to the blessing of God and St. Mat- 



120 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

thew, under whose invocation we have ventured to place 
it, and to the judgment and reflection of the reader. The 
five questions now to be asked, are as follows : 1. Why God 
should wish us to love Him ; 2. Why He Himself should 
love us ; 3. What sort of love we have for Him ; 4. In what 
way we repay His love for us ; and, 5. In what way He 
repays our love of Him. They are all abysses of creative 
love, and wonders which make us wiser even when they 
refuse to give up the secrets which they contain. 

We have, therefore, now to inquire why it is that God 
wishes us to love Him. At first sight, it seems one of those 
facts which are so very obvious that we never think of ask- 
ing the reason of them. But, on reflection, this old and 
commonplace fact unfolds so much that is strange and 
wonderful, that we almost unconsciously ask ourselves, if 
we are quite clear of the fact, if it is really so completely 
beyond all doubt that God wishes us to love Him. 

The difficulties, which make us begin almost to doubt 
the fact, are some such as these. That God should wish us 
to love Him, appears to imply some sort of want in Him. 
A desire is a kind of confession of imperfection ; and, 
according to the strength of the desire, so is the appear- 
ance of imperfection and incompleteness. Yet we know, 
that, to attribute any sort of want to the Creator would be 
simple blasphemy. Thou art my God, says the psalmist, 
because Thou desirest none of my goods. But our love is 
our greatest good, the affections of our heart are the noblest 
of our possessions, and God, we are told, earnestly desires 
to have them. Besides, if we once grant this fact, we are 
led into a further difficulty. For, immediately, this fact 
assumes such an importance, that it becomes the interpre- 
tation of all God's doings. Almost all we know of Him 
has at once to be resolved into this desire. A hundred 
other difficulties come up, and claim to be explained in the 
same way. We cannot conceive of God except as our 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 121 

Creator, nor of our Creator except as our Father ; for 
creation is unintelligible, unless it is defined to be a Free 
Act of Eternal Love, and then everything He does is the 
act of a Father, and is to be understood by the fact of our 
being His sons. We see that God cannot, simply because 
He is God, be moderately good to us. If we grant that He 
cares for us at all, then forthwith we see, that He must 
care for us so very much, that the vision of it tries our 
faith. So God cannot desire our love with a weak and 
indifferent desire. If He desires it at all, He must desire 
it with all the might of His ever-blessed perfections, and 
it requires strong faith and stronger love to look at this 
consequence, and not draw back before its seeming auda- 
city. 

If He reveals Himself to us at all, it is because He wants 
us to serve Him ; and as we saw in the last chapter, He 
being what He is and we being what we are, the creature 
cannot serve the Creator with any other than a service of 
love. This is what the Church means when she tells us, 
that without some love in our repentance, we are incapable 
of absolution. If He gives us positive precepts or an ac- 
ceptable ceremonial, it is as a way to Him, because He 
would fain secure our love. If He sends His Son to save 
sinners, it is because He vouchsafes to appear as if He can- 
not make up His mind to lose the love of men. If He takes 
us to Himself in heaven, it is that He may have us with 
Him, and feed His glory on our love. For we creatures 
cannot be His end : His end must be Himself, and nothing 
can exist except for His glory. If He detains us in pur- 
gatory, it is to multiply earth^s harvest of love, and to make 
a greater profit on imperfect souls. If, dread thought ! He 
lays us in the hopeless dismal deep of fire, it is because we 
have frustrated His yearnings, and refused Him the love 
He vouchsafed so incomprehensibly to covet. 

But this is not all. He seems to forget that He is God, 

L 



122 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

because of the greatness of this desire. His ever-blessed 
Majesty will forgive us words of this sort, by which alone 
we can force upon our dull hearts the conviction of the im- 
mensity of His love. He appears to deny His own nature 
and greatness in order to obtain our love. Is the facility 
of pardon consistent with the rigor of His vindictive jus- 
tice, or with the spotlessness of His overwhelming sanctity ? 
Is it easy to see how He should require the unspeakable 
sufferings of our dearest Lord, and should take them as an 
expiation for the sins of others, and for sins that were not 
to be committed till hundreds of years had come and gone ? 
Is it easy to see why baptised infants should be admitted 
to enjoy the Beatific Vision, or to reconcile with our notions 
of right that he who came to toil only at the eleventh hour 
should receive the same wages with him who had borne 
the burden and heat of the day ? Does God seem to legis- 
late so much for His justice, or His sanctity, or His dignity, 
as for procuring the greatest number of souls to love Him, 
and for rendering the harvest of redemption as enormous 
as the perversity of our free-will allows ? 

There is a further difficulty in the unintelligible value 
which He seems to set upon our love. Think of what our 
love is like, and of what good it can possibly be to God, 
and then conceive its being worth the price He paid for it 
on Calvary 1 Yet if we do not suppose it was worth it, we 
bring a charge against His wisdom, as if the Incarnation 
and the Passion were gratuitous and exaggerated. And it 
is no answer to say that it was all for our sakes, and rather 
a proof of His love for us, than of His desire for our love. 
For we must continually bear in mind what sound theology 
teaches us, that God alone can be His own end, and not 
we creatures. He can only bless us for His own glory. 
It is His perfection, that He must needs seek Himself in 
all things. He would not be God, if it were not so. We 
can hardly conceive of God creating, if He did not set a 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 123 

value upon His own creation. Yet we could not bring our- 
selves to believe that God set any value upon a few millions 
of round orbs, or on their velocity, or on their fidelity to 
their orbits, or to their eccentricities, or to the mere vast- 
ness of sidereal space, or to the various structure of matter, 
or to the threads of metal in the bowels of the mountains, 
or to the vivifying force of the solar ray, or to the gigantic 
play of the ubiquitous electricity, or to fine trees, or to 
clear lakes, or to sylvan dells, or to the outlines of a sea 
coast, or to the gorgeousness of sunsets, or to the pomp of 
storms, or to anything whatever of that sort. Even we 
creatures should feel that we were lowering Him in our 
own estimation, if we thought that He set a value upon, or 
took pains with, or had an interest in, such things as these. 
Yet we are told that He does distinctly set a value on the 
spirits of angels and the hearts of men. Man is the end 
of the material world, but God alone is the end of man. 
Physical philosophers can love strata of rock, or the distri- 
bution of plants, or a peculiar fauna, or the habits of earth- 
quakes, or the occultations of stars, or the physical geo- 
graphy of the sea, or the delicacies of chemistry, more than 
they love the hearts of men, the slaves of the south, or the 
inmates of a hospital. But God cannot do so. All His 
own material creation is worthless to Him in comparison 
with one peasant's heart, or with one child's first serious 
prayer. He has given away, with the indifi'erence of inter- 
minable wealth, all the rest of His creation ; but hearts He 
has kept for Himself, and will not even share them, much 
less surrender them. Yet where is their value ? What is 
finite love to an Infinite Beatitude ? Keally it is not easy 
to see. Yet can we doubt that it is something, and some- 
thing very precious in His eyes to whom all things else are 
nothing worth ? 

One dijficulty more. What is the meaning of that sur- 
passing joy which human love causes in God ? Surely this 



124 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

is a profound mystery. The life of God is joy, joy illimit- 
able, joy ineffable, joy unimaginable, joy eternal. The 
whole bewildering immensity of angelical and human joy 
is but a tiny drop out of the boundless ocean of the joy of 
God. What a variety of joys there are in each human 
heart. No two of these joys are exactly the same. They 
differ as one note differs from another note in music. They 
make new joys by new combinations. Different scenes, 
different phases of life, different ages, all diversify the 
throng of joys which one human heart can experience. 
Yet no two hearts are exactly alike ; so that the multitu- 
dinous joys of the heart are to be multiplied by the myriads 
and myriads of hearts, dead, alive, or yet unborn. Now 
every one of these joys has its representative in the simple 
plenitude of the joy of God. But what are human joys to 
joys angelical ? Yet they too are all but a manifold um- 
brage of the one joy of God. The joys of the animal crea- 
tion, their joy in health and strength, in light and air, in 
cold and heat, in wet and dry, in their sweet songs or their 
loud wars, in their speed of flight or their spring of 
muscle, in tending their young or tearing their prey, all 
are shadows, lowest, dimmest, faintest, poorest shadows of 
the joy of God. And who is sufficient to compute these 
things ? And what if the joys of the Immaculate Heart of 
the Divine Mother are to be reckoned also, and those of 
that Sacred Heart which the Person of the Word deluged 
with its oil of gladness, and yet left it human still? Yet 
when we have got so far, we can hardly be said to have 
begun. Who can tell the joy of the Father in His Innasci- 
bility, or the joy of the Son in His eternal and perpetual 
Generation, or the joy of the Holy Ghost in His everlasting 
and incessant Procession from the Father and the Son? 
The Jubilee of the Father and the Son is Himself: not a 
thing or a perception, but an eternal Person, Himself the 
illimitable Limit of the illimitable God. Who will dare to 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 125 

picture to himself the awful and majestic jubilation of the 
August Trinity in the Threefoldness of Persons and the 
Unity of Essence ? God^s joy in His own Oneness, — who 
can look at it except either he be stricken with an ecstasy 
of rapture, or be dissolved in tears of believing love ? And 
is all this not enough? Is God seeking joy, more joy, joy 
elsewhere? And is it joy in creatures, created joy? Can 
His own joy hold more, can it grow, can it receive, can it 
want ? If not, why break the silence of eternity to create, 
why this hunting after human love, why this ardent patient 
pursuit after sinful hearts, why this joy over returning 
sinners, why this preciousness in His sight of the death of 
His saints ? We may indeed ask, why : but can we give 
an answer ? heaven and earth ! angels and men ! 
"What a Being God is 1 What a joy it is to be a creature ! 
What a glory to have a Creator ! 

What is to be done with all these difficulties ? One thing 
is plain. We need not try to answer them. St. Thomas 
himself, if he rose from the dead, could not answer them. 
But there is one thing to be observed about them, and it is 
this. While they are such difficulties as make us doubt 
whether God really does desire our love, they are at the 
same time irrefragable proofs of the fact that He does de- 
sire it, and that He desires it with a most mysterious inten- 
sity. They prove the fact, if they do not account for it ; 
and they prove it in such a way as that we need not have 
it accounted for, in order to receive it. For we can have 
no doubt about the fact. But can we approximate to a 
solution of the problem ? Can we throw any kind of light 
upon the mystery ? Can we diminish the difficulties which 
we confessedly are unable to answer ? This must be our 
next endeavour ; and whether we succeed or not, we shall 
at least gain a great amount of additional evidence to the 
fact that God does desire our love. We have our misgivings 
whether we shall do more than this. 

l2 



126 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

Let us look first of all at the kingdom of nature, whether 
Divine, angelical, or human, and see if it does not disclose 
to us reasons why God should so yearn for the affection of 
human hearts. One reason why it is impossible for us to 
comprehend the Divine Nature, or even to make an imagi- 
nary picture of it, is its extreme and adorable simplicity. 
Properly speaking God has no perfections. He is Himself 
His own one sole perfection, the perfection of perfections. 
What we call the divine perfections are only our imperfect 
ways of approaching towards a true idea of Him. Never- 
theless we are capable of considering Him as not our Crea- 
tor, and then again as our Creator. We know that although 
God is immutable, still there was a time when He had not 
created us, and again a time when He had created us. Or 
if we consider that He had always created us in His own 
mind, still we can, from what He has been pleased to tell 
us of Himself, conceive of Him as being without any crea- 
tures at all. As a world is the largest thing we know of, a 
cosmos, an order, a beauty, all on the vastest scale, so we 
may dream of the great God as fourteen worlds in Himself, 
of surpassing beauty and variety, yet all without limit and 
circumscription, and one, absolutely one in their own sim- 
plicity, although fourteen in our conceptions. 

Four of these worlds seem — remember how utterly short 
of the mark, and beside it, human words are in the matter 
— to contain the inmost life of God. We call them His 
Infinity, His Immensity, His Immutability, and His Eter- 
nity. They are at once conditions of His Essence, and of 
all the perfections which we can attribute to His Essence. 
Around them stand four other worlds, of ravishing loveli- 
ness enough to separate body and soul if we might see 
them uncloudedly. They are Omnipotence, Wisdom, Per- 
fection, which is the natural goodness of God, and Sanctity, 
which we may call His moral goodness. Now in these 
eight worlds there is not necessarily any respect to crea- 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 127 

tures. They belong to the eternal Self-sufficiency of God 
independent of any creation whatever. They furnish us 
with no reason at all why God should desire our love. On 
the contrary they are so magnificently self-sufficing, so 
adorably complete, that they are rather so many arguments 
against the existence of any such unfathomable desire. 

Around these eight worlds are six other worlds, to be 
mentioned only with the wondering humility of filial and 
more than filial love, worlds which concern ourselves and 
are colored by our destinies, worlds in which we ourselves 
also dwell from eternity, and which are at this hour, and 
will be evermore, our only country and our only home. 
They are the Divine Benignity, Dominion, Providence, 
Mercy, Justice, and that perfection of God which we call 
His being the Last End of all things. If God were to be 
conceived without creatures, nothing can be added to the 
first eight worlds, and nothing taken from them, without 
His ceasing to be God. If He be conceived as with crea- 
tures, as He is actually, then the addition of anything to 
the whole fourteen worlds, or the subtraction of anything 
from them, would inevitably alter our idea of God. We 
may use many other great words of Him, but the meaning 
of them, the excellence intended by them, is already im- 
plied and included in one of the fourteen worlds. 

Now the very existence of these six worlds in God of 
itself will furnish us with most overwhelming proofs of 
His desire that we should love Him. Yet it does not appear 
that it in any way accounts for the existence of that desire. 
And the fact that this desire is founded in the very nature 
of God, and the very immensity of His perfection, is the 
more overwhelming when we reflect that, although we can 
by an arbitrary act of our imagination, conceive God to be 
without creatures, yet that in point of fact He never was 
so, as He had created the world in His own mind from the 



128 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

beginning ; and thus the idea of Creator, and consequently 
of all that it implies, is inseparable from Him. 

The eternity of God before creation is a collection of 
mysteries, which it is vain for us to sound. In what way 
His decrees, enclosed in His own mind, ministered to His 
glory, or gave exercise to His mercy or His justice or His 
providence, why the primal creation of the angels took 
place as soon as it did, or why it did not take place sooner, 
why He, — not broke, not interrupted, not disturbed, all 
that is impossible — but why He superadded to, the tranquil 
self-sufficiency of that eternity, not the effort, not the toil, 
but the fulfilling of His will, in the act of creation, whether 
the absence of a heaven full of rational and beatified wor- 
shippers could in any sense at all add anything to the un- 
created solitude of the Three Divine Persons, whether their 
foreseen worship in His mind, to whom there is no past or 
future, but only one active unsuccessive present, was pre- 
cisely the same to Him as its actual existence external to 
Himself, how it was that this worship did not in any way 
illustrate or beautify God's perfection in His own esteem, — 
what can we say of all these things than that they are be- 
yond us : and yet also that they make us feel how astonish- 
ingly intimate to God is His desire of His creature's love ? 
Surely in this wide field of colossal miracles, here is fresh 
proof of the desire, fresh example of its intensity, yet no 
solution of the enigma. 

We have nothing to do here with theological disputes 
regarding the order of the Divine Decrees. We know that 
none could have any precedence or priority in respect of 
time. Their order could be only that of dignity and emi- 
nence. But what a fountain of affectionate thoughts, 
tljoughts honorable to God in the highest degree, is opened 
up in the dark depths of His mysterious predestination. 
We know that God is free, and that nothing can impair the 
spotlessness of His transcendent liberty. Yet how can we 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 129 

conceive otherwise of predestination than as God binding 
Himself, putting conditions, like fetters, on His own royal 
and everlasting liberty ; and for our sakes, out of love of 
us, in order to have our love? Inconceivable mystery! 
how can we believe it without a very miracle of grace and 
infused faith ? Men talk as if it was their liberty which 
suffered in the act of predestination. Nay, rather it is the 
liberty of God. Wayward men ! as if we were to be always 
suspecting God, always on our guard against Him, as if 
He could be- claiming our liberty, who has already given 
us His glory to make as free with almost as we please ! 
How can that act injure our liberty, when without it, we 
should not even have had life ? We owe our liberty to our 
life, and our life to God's predestination. We are free as 
air, only too free, all things considered. But it has puzzled 
the wisest understandings of mankind to see how the mag- 
nificent liberty of God rests unimpaired by the prodigal 
compassions of His eternal predestination. But it was as 
if a necessity were upon Him. Hive me children or I die, 
said the impetuous Rachel, longing to be a mother. So, at 
all costs, God must have creatures to love Him, sons to 
honor and to serve Him and to keep Him immortal com- 
pany. At any cost He must have created love, over which 
to outpour Himself with a stupendous communication of 
uncreated love, complacency, and joy. 

Hence, who does not see that he predestined all men, 
together with all angels, to be saved; and yet, by that 
decree. He left their freedom unimpaired ? Before — we are 
speaking as words compel us — before He had foreseen 
aught else, and moved only by the excess of his own un- 
speakable goodness, He decreed to create the natures of 
angels and men, simply that He might raise them to the 
vision of Himself, and to participate in His beatitude. He 
chose no certain number, so as to exclude others. In the 
adorably real sincerity of His own will. He would have all 
9 



130 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

men, and all angels, saved, and was ready to give, to each 
and all, the necessary graces. Hence, also, came that 
marvellous determination of superabundant love, to create 
both angels and men in a state of grace, that they might 
the more readily attain to their supernatural end. Then, 
vi'hen He foresaw the free and wilful demerits of some, and 
the free loyal correspondence to grace in others, there was 
no energy in that prevision to secure the condemnation of 
the first, while His mercy rejoiced already to adorn and set 
aside the crowns for the second. Nor was it, as we sup- 
pose, until after this prevision, that there was any absolute 
election or reprobation. And thus man's liberty was se- 
cured throughout ; and the result is, that of all the multi- 
tudes of those who are lost, not one can attribute his ruin 
to any predetermining act of God, but simply to their own 
efforts to free themselves from the solicitudes of His grace ; 
while, of all the countless souls and spirits of the blessed, 
there is not one who does not owe his joy to the eternal 
predestination of His Maker. And what is all this, but 
another set of evidences to prove the greatness of God^s 
desire to have our love, while it still leaves deep down in 
the abyss of His goodness the reason of this desire ? 

If we consider the arrangements of creation and natural 
preservation, we shall see that they, in like manner, testify 
to the Creator's desire to excite our love. It is impossible 
to make too much of the fact, that both angels and men 
were created in a state of grace. Then, again, there is a 
sort of superabundance in our natural gifts. AYe have so 
many more than seem absolutely necessary to our dis- 
charging the duties for which we came into the world. 
Life is itself an intense pleasure ; so much so, that men 
prize it above all other things. The most miserable of men 
will hardly part without reluctance with the simple power 
of living. All our natural gifts, also, are so constructed 
as to be avenues of enjoyment and delight. There is not 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 131 

a sense, in whose exercise there is not a keenness and a 
peculiarity of satisfaction, of which those who lack that 
sense can form no adequate conception. It requires a soul, 
either in the strength of its first integrity or in the vigor 
of supernatural grace, to hold us back from being swept 
away by the might of sensual pleasure. The exercise of 
the various faculties of the mind, also open out new sources 
of the strangest delight and the most thrilling happiness. 
We can think of and count up a score of different plea- 
sureable feelings consequent on the use of our minds, not 
one of which we can adequately describe in words. What, 
then, shall we say of the romance and nobility of the 
affections of our hearts, those very hearts God so much 
covets? Almost as many loves grow in the soil of the 
heart, as there are wines in the vineyards of the earth ; and 
has not the whole world many a time gone wild with their 
intoxication ? 

So, also, in the adaptation of material nature to our 
dominion, everything is characterized by excessive profu- 
sion, by unnecessary beauty. Everything, almost, has a 
sweetness beyond and beside its own proper function. The 
heathen talked of Mother Earth; and truly God has filled 
her teeming bosom with the milk of more than a mother's 
kindness. Whether she feeds, or heals, or soothes, or 
inspires, or simply wins us by the lustre of her physical 
beauty, she is ever doing more than she promises, and 
enhances her gifts by the fondness of her ministrations. 
There is something to make us tremble to see with what 
fineness of balance, with what nicety of restraint, our 
Creator tames the huge elements in our behalf, and makes 
us live at ease amid the bewildering vastness of their ope- 
rations, and close by the uneasy laboratories of their titanic 
power. Everywhere, and for our sakes. He governs, not 
through the catastrophies of violent power, but through 
the meekness of a patient and a pleasant uniformity. 



132 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

Here is fresh demonstration that He craves our love, and 
no reason given but the blessed one of his free benignant 
will. 

Once more, before we leave the kingdom of nature, let 
us look at the way in which the Bible discloses Him to us 
in successive dispensations. He plants an Eden for his 
new-made creatures, and then comes to them Himself; and 
the evenings of the young world are consecrated by fami- 
liar colloquies between the creatures and their Creator. 
He tests their love by the lightest of precepts ; and, when 
they have broken it, clear above the accents of a strangely 
moderate anger, are heard the merciful promises of a Sa- 
viour. Then come centuries of mysterious strife, like 
Jacob wrestling with God by the tinkling waters of the 
midnight stream. No sin seems to weary Him. No way- 
wardness is a match for the perseverance of His love. 
Merciful and miraculous interventions are never wanting. 
No gifts are thought too much or too good, if the creatures 
will but condescend to take them. On the Mesopotamian 
sheep-walks, in the Egyptian brick-fields, in the palm- 
spotted wilderness, among the vineyards of Engaddi, by 
the headlong floods of harsh Babylon, it is always the same. 
God cannot do without us. He cannot afi'ord to lose our 
love. He clings to us ; He pleads with us ; He punishes 
only to get love, and stays His hand in the midst; He 
melts our hearts with beautiful complainings ; He mourns 
like a rejected lover or a suspected friend ; He appeals to 
us with a sort of humility which has no parallel in human 
love. What a character of God we should draw from the 
Bible only! and what would it all come to, but that to win 
the love of His creatures was the ruling passion of the 
Creator ? Oh ! horrible beyond all horrors must the heart 
be that will not love God, that particular God of the Bible, 
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ ! God desiring, and man withholding, 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 133 

and then God getting, as it were, by stealth or by caress, 
less than a tithe of His due from less than a tithe of His 
creation, and then as it were spreading Himself out in a 
kind of joyous triumph at his success, — is not this a 
truthful compendium of the Bible history? 

If from nature we turn to grace, we shall find that the 
whole resolves itself into a loving pursuit of souls on the 
part of God. "We shall meet there the same evidence of 
the fact with as little solution of the difficulty. The king- 
dom of grace, if it is not founded on the permission of 
evil, seems at least to imply it ; and the permission of evil 
is nothing less than the intense desire of the Creator for 
the love of His creatures. Surely that is the whole 
account of this terrific mjstery. At what a price must He 
estimate the love of angels and of men, if He would run 
so fearful a risk to gain it ? Nay, it could be no risk to 
Him whose foreknowledge made all things present to 
Him. Every possible, as well as every actual, consequence 
of that permission was vividly before Him, and yet He 
persisted. It was worth while. It was for His glory, and 
His glory is our inestimable good. If evil was not per- 
mitted, angels and men would not be free. If they were 
not free, they could not serve Him with a service of love ; 
for freedom is necessary to love. They, whom the sight 
of Him now confirms in holiness for evermore, would not 
have won their crowns, and therefore a heaven of saints 
ready made from the beginning would not in fact have 
been a service of free allegiance and voluntary love. Yet 
what a fearful venture, rather what an appalling certainty, 
was that permission of evil. The All-merciful saw before 
Him the burning abyss, so sadly populous. It was to Him 
a vision of more unutterable horror than it could be even 
to the capacious soul of Mary or the keen intelligence of 
Michael. Yet onwards He drove right through it, in the 
plentitude of that greater and more overwhelming good- 

M 



134 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

Dess wherewith He yearned for His creature's love. 
what clearness of demonstration is there here in the pitchy 
darkness of that intolerable secret ! 

Then that grave permission came to His eldest sons, to 
that primeval world of angels. For one moment they 
looked at Him in all the beauty of His kind dominion, and 
then they looked at self with its enticing liberty, and forth- 
with one whole multitude, a third of that wide empire, ten 
million times ten million spirits, a very universe of loveli- 
ness and gifts and graces, made their irremediable choice, 
and in the madness of their liberty leaped into the stun- 
ning war of the fiery whirlpool, far away from the meek 
paternal majesty of God. Their irremediable choice ! 
what a thought is that for us ! The angels could not com- 
plain. They had had a marvellous abundance of love. 
The gifts of their nature were something beyond our 
power of imagining. They were so bright and vast and 
sure as to be almost a security against their fall. They 
had also been created in a state of grace, and doubtless of 
the most exquisite and resplendent grace. Moreover they 
had all perhaps merited immensely by the first act of love 
with which they greeted their Creator in the exulting 
moment when at His dear will their grand spirits sprung 
from nothingness. Yet one chance, one only 1 Our 
different experience of God makes us tremble at the 
thought. When we broke our light precept, and forfeited 
our original integrity, He would not lose us so. He only 
redoubled His mercies, and multiplied our means of salva- 
tion: so that it has become almost a doubt in theology 
whether we are not better off now that we have fallen, than 
we should have been had we preserved the innocence and 
rectitude of paradise. When we consider the various dis- 
pensations which followed the fall, the antediluvian times, 
the patriarchal dispensation, the Levitical, the Christian, as 
if God would still leave us free, yet for all that, and in 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 135 

spite of fearful losses, would not be baffled in His yearning 
for our love, we might almost venture to compare His in- 
finite Majesty to one of His own insignificant creatures, to 
the spider who with the same quiet assiduity of toil is ever 
repairing its often broken web, still trusting the same 
treacherous site, still braving the same almost inevitable 
calamities. Can we give any reason for this, or say more, 
than that there is a reason, which God has hidden in the 
greatness of His own goodness ? 

The Incarnation, that mystery of the divine magnifi- 
cence, in which all the intelligible perfections of God pass 
in array before us as in beautiful procession, teaches us 
the same lesson. If God would have come to His unfallen 
creature, and been borne within the womb of a human 
Mother, and have shared our nature, and have lived among 
us, and for three-and-thirty years have unfolded countless 
mysteries of glory, surpassing even those of the paschal 
forty days, what can we say but that it would have been a 
proof of His desire for His creature^s love, which we could 
only have adored in silent thankfulness ? A creature the 
Creator cannot be ; but He will have a created Nature, and 
make it unspeakably one with His Divine Person, so that 
He may be more like one of us, and heighten our reverence 
by the trembling freedoms of our familiarity, if only He 
may so enjoy vast augmentations of human love. If 
because we fell. He changed the manner of His coming, if 
rather than abandon His coming He plunged His Mother 
and Himself in a very ocean of sorrows, if, without hum- 
bling us by telling us of the change. He contentedly took 
shame for glory, suffering for joy, slavery for a kingdom, 
the cross instead of the crown, what did it all show but 
that He would still have our love, and that with ingenious 
compassion, which could only be divine, He would take the 
advantage of our miseries to exalt us all the more, and so 
win more abundant love ? If He came only because we 



136 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

had fallen, if He condescended to be but a remedy for an 
evil, if He stooped to fight our battle in person, and in 
human flesh, with our triumphant enemy, if the Incarna- 
tion was an interference to prevent His own world from 
being stolen from Him, if it was a fresh invention out of 
the boundless resources of the divine pity, then still what 
does it mean but that He would not let us go, He would not 
let us lose ourselves, because in His strangely persevering 
goodness He would not lose our love ? 

So again what is the Church but His way of rendering 
the blessings of His Incarnation omnipresent and everlast- 
ing ? What is the Baptism of infants but a securing pre- 
maturely, and as it were against all reason, the eternal 
love of their unconscious souls ? What is Confession, but 
mercy made common, justice almost eluded, the most made 
out of the least? These are human words, but they ex- 
press something true. What is the sacrament of Confirma- 
tion but an act of jealousy, lest the world should steal from 
God what He had already got? What is the sacrament of 
Matrimony, but a taking of the stufi" and substance of 
human life, its common sorrows and joys, its daily smiles 
and tears, the wear and tear of its rough and smooth, and 
elevating it all by a sort of heavenly transfiguration into a 
ceaseless fountain of supernatural and meritorious love ? 
What is Extreme Unction, but an expression of affectionate 
nervousness, if we may so speak, of our dearest Lord, lest 
we should fail Him just at the last, when so many risks are 
run ? What is the sacrament of Order, but systematizing 
and ensuring a succession of daily miracles, such as con- 
secrations, absolutions, exorcisms, and benedictions, each 
one of which is to create, and then to fertilize, and then to 
beautify, a little world of love for Him ? Ask the Divine 
Solitary of the tabernacle why He lives His hermit life 
amongst us, and what could His answer be but this — I 
wait, to show love and to receive it ? But wide as He has 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 137 

made the ample bosom of His Church, and though He has 
multiplied with a commonness, which almost injures rever- 
ence, the potent sacraments, this is not enough. None 
must slip through, if He can but help it. None must be 
lost except in His despite. There must be something still 
left, which needs no priest, something as wide as air and 
as free, which men may have when they cannot have, or 
at the needful moment cannot find, the sacraments of His 
own loving institution. One thing there is, and one only, 
and we are not surely now surprised to find that one thing 
— love. If need be, love can baptise without water, can 
confirm without chrism, can absolve without ordination, 
can almost communicate without a Host. For love is a 
higher emanation of that priesthood which is for ever ac- 
cording to the order of Melchisedech. How shall we read 
these riddles, if they may not mean that God so desires our 
love, that He almost tires our attention and outstrips our 
imagination by the novelty and profusion of His merciful 
desires to secure this marvellously priceless treasure, the 
puny love of finite hearts ? 

There are many difficulties in the doctrine of grace, as 
well as in those of predestination and the permission of 
evil, which seem to interfere with our perception of God^s 
love, with its impartiality as well as its completeness. But 
if we, each of us, remove the cause from the theological 
schools to the court in our own heart, these difficulties will 
be greatly diminished, if not entirely dispelled. Let our 
own hearts therefore be the last part of the kingdom of 
grace which we shall examine. Can any one of us say that 
we have not received numberless graces to which we have 
not corresponded ? Have we ever sinned, not only without 
its being wilfully done, but also without a distinct resist- 
ance to conscience, grace, or contrary inspirations ? If we 
were to die and be lost at this moment, is it not as clear as 
the sun at noon that we have no one to blame for it but our- 

m2 



138 WHY GOD AVISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

selves ? Has not our whole life been one series of merciful 
interferences on the part of God? Have there not been 
many times when our petulance and waywardness have 
reached such a point, that we in like case should have given 
up our dearest friends, our closest kindred, as past the pos- 
sibility of amendment, or not worth the trouble of reproof? 
And yet God has not given us up. His tenderness. His 
liberality. His assiduity. His patience, His hopefulness, 
and if we may use the word. His extraordinary unprovoked- 
ness, have been beyond all words. And how do we stand 
at this hour ? We have merited hell. Perhaps we have 
merited it a thousand times over. We ought to be there 
now, if justice had all its rights. But it is an unjust 
world, and God is the grand victim of its injustice. He 
alone has not His rights. He lets His mercy do strange 
things with His liberty. AYe have merited hell purely of 
our own free will: nay, we have had to stifle inward re- 
proaches and to make considerable efforts in order to ac- 
complish our own perdition. That we are not yet in hell, 
that we have actually a good chance of heaven, is simply 
because God cannot find in His heart to abandon the pos- 
sibility of our love. In a word, look at yourself, for self is 
the only thing which concerns you in these difficulties of 
grace and predestination. Has God ever done you any- 
thing but good ? Has He not done you an overwhelming 
amount of good? Has He not simply been so good to you, 
that you yourself cannot conceive of anything, except the 
Divine Nature, being so good ? Either in kind, or in de- 
gree, in manner, or in matter, can you so much as conceive 
of any created goodness being anything like so good ? 
merciful God ! Thou art too good to us. Thou standest 
in Thine own light. Thy mercies hide in one another; 
they go out of sight because they are so tall : they pass 
unnoticed because they are so deep : they weary our thank- 
fulness because they are so numerous : they make us dis- 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOYE HIM. 139 

believe because they are so gratuitous, so common, so en- 
during. We should more readily have acknowledged what 
Thou hast done for us, if Thou hadst only done much less ! 

Are we tired of all this evidence, especially when it leaves 
still unexplained the mystery it so amply proves? This is 
not the place to discuss the joys of the Beatific Vision, 
although there is hardly a more tempting province of 
theology. Nevertheless we can hardly close our case with- 
out some consideration of the kingdom of glory, considered 
in reference to our present enquiry. In the case of a parent 
or a teacher we judge of the value set upon a particular 
line of conduct, by the greatness of the reward promised 
and actually conferred. Now, if we love God, the reward 
promised us is nothing less than the sight of God Himself, 
face to Face, not transiently, not as a glorious flash of 
light renewed once in ten thousand years to feed our im- 
mortality with contentment and delight, but an abiding 
Vision, a glory and a gladness, a marvellous rapture of the 
will, and an ecstasy of vast intelligence, for evermore. Think 
how such a reward transcends all the expectations, all the 
possibilities even, of our nature ! How God must love us, 
and how too He must love our love, to have prepared for us 
such joys as these, which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, 
nor man^s heart conceived ! 

We must consider also that although our beatitude, quite 
rigorously speaking, does not consist so much or so directly 
in love, as in the actual vision of God by our understand- 
ings, nevertheless love is that which immediately follows 
from it, and which is directly connatural to it. So that it 
comes to this : our reward is for having loved God ; it is no 
less a reward than God Himself, not any of His gifts ; and 
it is an ability to love Him infinitely better than we have 
ever done before, and also eternally. He takes us to Him- 
self. He makes us His own companions for evermore. He 
multiplies himself in us, and reflects Himself in our beati- 



140 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

fied souls, as if it were in so many images of Himself. " In 
other created things/^ says Lessius, *'as in the fabric of 
the world, and the various degrees of things, certain thin 
rays of His divinity shine forth, from which we can, as it 
were by a conjecture, learn His power, His wisdom, and 
His goodness. But in our minds elevated by the light of 
glory and united to Him in the Beatific Vision, the whole 
plenitude of the divinity shines forth, the whole of His 
beauty softly glows; so that, although the divinity is one in 
itself, it is in a marvellous manner multiplied, so that there 
seem to be as many divinities as there are beatified minds.-*' 
Love is the reason of the reward, love is the consequence 
of the reward, love is the conduct rewarded, and the reward 
itself is love. If we knew nothing more of God than this, 
need more be known ? 

We must not forget also the huge price which this reward 
has cost our Creator. When we had forfeited it, it required 
as it were an effort of all His conjoined perfections to re- 
cover it for us once again. A God made Man, the shame 
of a God, the sufferings of a God, the Blood of a God, the 
death of a God ! Such was the price of what we shall one 
day enjoy in heaven. What can we do but weep silently? 
How do all complaints about the permission of evil and the 
mystery of election die away, when we think of things like 
these ! How ungraceful, ungraceful rather than ungrate- 
ful, do they seem. The Incarnation of a God, the shame 
of a God, the sufferings of a God, the Blood of a God, the 
death of a God ! That was what I cost ! It is now my 
daily bread, my daily light, my daily life ! I confess that 
faith is almost overwhelmed with these considerations. 
for some corner, the least, the lowest, and the last in the 
world to come, where we may spend an untired eternity in 
giving silent thanks to Jesus Crucified ! 

But, if what God paid was so great, the littleness of what 
earns it on our part is a mystery almost as wonderful. A 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 141 

Magdalen's love was but a paltry price to pay for a reward 
so vast. But think of the dying thief! One act of love, 
one act of contrition, the brief tardy graces of a death-bed, 
— what must be the might of our Saviour\s Blood when it 
can concentrate the whole merit of eternal life in such little 
momentary things as these ? If we died at this moment, it 
is our firm hope that we should be saved ; and yet can our 
hope rest on what we ourselves have done ? Is there not 
something painful in confronting the magnitude of our re- 
compense, with the trifling service we have given God 
but grudgingly, out of hearts only half weaned from the 
world, and scarcely weaned at all from self? Surely God 
must desire our love with an amazing fervor of desire, 
when He gives so much, to have so little in return ! 

There is one thing more to remark about the Beatific 
Vision, before we close our case. It is a very obvious 
reflection, yet perhaps we do not dwell upon it sufficiently, 
that now, in our fallen state, it is not innocence which 
earns the sight of God, but love, humble, repentant, 
penance-doing love. Nay, even in an unfallen or angelic 
world, it would only be innocence in the shape of love, 
which could earn the heavenly recompense. Thus also in 
our journey heavenwards, it is love which takes every step, 
and love alone. It is not the sharpness of the austerity 
which merits, but the love. It is not the patience in sick- 
ness, or the silence under calumny, or the perseverance in 
prayer, or the zeal of apostolic labor, which win the 
crown, but just the love, and the love only, that is in the 
patience and the silence and the prayer and the zeal. 
Martyrdom without love is unprofitable before God. He 
has no longing for anything but love. He puts no price 
on other things. His taste is exclusive. His covetousness 
is confined to that one thing. O if we could be as simple 
and as single in our desires as God! He only wants our 
luve, and more of it, and more, and more. Why should 



142 WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 

not we also want one thing only, to love Him, and to love 
Him more, and more, and more? Surely if we prayed 
only for that after which He longs so earnestly, our prayer 
would not wait for its answer long ; and then in His eyes,-* 
and who would wish to be so in other eyes ? we should soon 
be like the saints. 

We conclude from all these considerations, that of the 
fact that God condescends intensely to desire our love, 
there can be no possible doubt ; and we think it is more 
true to say that this fact, that He desires our love, is the 
foundation of all practical religion, than the equally certain 
fact that He loves us. We mean that our duties and our 
love flow more obviously from the one than from the other. 
The one comes nearer to us than the other. But as to the 
reason which we are to assign for this desire on the part 
of our beneficent Creator, we can only say that often in 
religion the answer to one mystery is another mystery 
greater than the first. We can find no better answer than 
this, He wishes us to love Him, because He so loves us. 
Upon which we are obliged forthwith to ask ourselves the 
further question, Why does God love us ? And this must 
be the enquiry for the next chapter. 

Meanwhile we are not at all disconcerted with the vague- 
ness of our answer, nor with the apparently small result of 
our enquiry. The fact is that religious truth is always 
fruitful and enchanting ; and God is our truest enjoyment 
even already upon earth ; and as we shall enjoy Him in 
heaven, yet never comprehend Him, so it is life's greatest 
joy on earth to watch the operations of God and to muse upon 
His wonders, though their meaning is either only partially 
disclosed to us, or perhaps even hidden from us altogether. 
Oh! is any one so dead in heart, so blighted in mind and 
aspiration, as to be able to look all this divine love in the 
face, and not be won by it to better things ? Blessed, 
blessed God ! Wonderful Father ! Compassionate Creator ! 



WHY GOD WISHES US TO LOVE HIM. 143 

this mystery of His desiring our poor love should of itself 
be a lifelong joy to us in our time of pilgrimage. It puts 
a new face upon the world. All things glow with another 
light. A feeling of security comes upon us, like a gift 
from heaven, and wraps us round ; and the cold chill goes 
from our heart, and the dark spots are illuminated ; and 
we want nothing more now, nothing. Earth has nothing 
to give, which would not be a mere impertinence after this 
desire of God. Our hearts are full. We have no room for 
more. This desire of God solves all the problems of our 
inner life ; for it at once calms us in our present lowness, 
and spurs us on to higher things, and the name of that 
double state, the calm and the spur, — what is it but per- 
fection? God loves me — God desires my love. He has 
asked for it; He covets it, He prizes it more than I do my- 
self! I would fain tell the poor trees, and the little birds 
that are roosting, and the patient beasts slumbering in the 
dewy grass, and the bright waters, and the wanton winds, 
and the clouds as they sail above me, and that white moon, 
and those flickering far-off stars, that God desires my love, 
mine, even mine ! And it is true, infallibly true. God, 
Thou art my God because my goods are nothing unto Thee! 
What shall I do ? If I may not doubt this mystery, what 
can I do but die of love? Oh Thou, who in the world 
above gives us the light of glory that we may bear to see 
Thy beauty, give us now the strength of faith to endure 
these revelations of Thy love ! 



144 WHY GOD LOYES US. 



CHAPTER II. 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 



Nemo amatorum carnalium, etiamsi sit in hoc ultra modum insaniens, 
sic exardescere potest in amorem dilectse suae, sicut Deus effunditur in 
amorem animarum nostrarum. — S. Chrysostom. 

If the answer to our first question, why God wishes us to 
love Him, only resulted in a mystery, we may be sure the 
answer to this second question, why God loves us, will only 
bring out a still greater mystery. Nevertheless, we must 
proceed to the discussion of it. Enquiry is more solid and 
more fruitful in divine things, than the most complete and 
satisfactory results in human sciences. 

The whole creation floats, as it were, in the ocean of 
God's almighty love. His love is the cause of all things, 
and of all the conditions of all things, and it is their end 
and rest as well. Had it not been for His love, they never 
would have existed, and, were it not for His love now, they 
would not be one hour preserved. Love is the reading of all 
the riddles of nature, grace, and glory ; and reprobation is 
practically the positive refusal on the part of the free crea- 
ture to partake of the Creator's love. Love is the light of 
all dark mysteries, the sublime consummation of all hopes, 
desires, and wisdoms, and the marvellous interpretation of 
God. Light is not so universal as love, for love is in dark- 
ness as well as light. Life is less strong than love ; for love 
is the victory over death, and is itself an immortal life. If 
it pleased God at this moment to destroy the air, the planet 
would have wheeled but a few leagues eastward before it 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 145 

would have become the home of universal death and deso- 
lation. Myriad myriads of warm and joyous lives would 
have been extinguished in one inarticulate gasp of choking 
agony. Not only would the streets and fields have been 
strewed with the suffocated dead, but the birds on the wing 
would have fallen lifeless to the ground ; the deep blue 
waters of the sea would not have screened their multitudi- 
nous tribes from the energy of the destroying edict. The 
subterranean creatures would have been found out and sti- 
fled in the crevices of the rocks, the black waters, or the 
winding ways beneath the ground. Earth's green vesture 
would be unrolled, and the fair orb would revolve in space 
an ugly mass of dull, discolored matter. Yet this picture 
of ruin is but a fiiint image of what would happen if God 
withdrew into His own self-sufficient glory, and called off 
that immensity of gratuitous love with which He covers all 
creation. For the destruction of the air would be but a 
material desolation. It would not invade the vast kingdoms 
of moral beauty, of spiritual life, of natural goodness, of 
infused holiness, of angelical intelligence, or of the beati- 
tude of human souls. As far as creation is concerned, God, 
as it were, concentrates all His attributes into one, becomes 
only one perfection, and that one perfection is to us the 
whole of God : and it is love. God is love, says St. John 
briefly ; and after that, nothing more was needed to be said. 
He has infinite power, boundless wisdom, indescribable 
holiness ; but to us the power, the wisdom, and the holiness 
come simply in the shape of love. To us creatures His 
infinity, His immensity, His immutability. His eternity, 
are simply love, infinite, immense, immutable, eternal love. 
AYhen we proved God's desire of our love, we at the same 
time proved undoubtedly His love of us. Reason and reve- 
lation, science and theology, nature, grace, and glory, alike 
establish the infallible truth that God loves His own crea- 
tures, and loves them as only God can love. The question 

10 N 



146 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

is why He loves us ; and our first step towards an answer 
must be to examine the character and degree of this love. 
The nature of a thing is often the best explanation both of 
its existence and its end. Let us see what God's love of us 
is like. 

In the first place, it passes all example. "We have no- 
thing to measure it by, nothing to compare it with. The 
creatures which God has created, furnish us with ideas by 
which we can imagine creatures which He has not created. 
We could not have conceived of a tree, if God had not 
made one. But now we can imagine a tree which shall be 
different from any actual tree, either in size, or in foliage, 
or in flower, or in fruit, or in the character of its growth 
and outline. So also of an animal, or even of a possible 
world. Whether we are unable to imagine any possible 
thing, which shall be more than a combination of certain 
actual things, or a variety of them, or an excess of them, 
is a question which we do not touch. God gives us some- 
thing to build our imaginary creatures upon, because He 
has surrounded us with a countless variety of creatures ; 
and we can judge of imaginary things in poetry, painting, 
or sculpture, according to the standard of nature. But we 
have no such help in understanding God's love of His crea- 
tures. It is without parallel, without similitude. It is 
based upon His own eternal goodness, which we do not 
understand. 

This leads us to its next feature, that it does not resemble 
human love, either in kind or in degree. It does not an- 
swer to the description of a creature's love. It manifests 
itself in different ways. It cannot be judged by the same 
principles. We cannot rise to the idea of it by successive 
steps of greater or less human love. The ties of paternal, 
fraternal, conjugal affection all express truths about the 
divine love ; but they not only express them in a very im- 
perfect way, they also fall infinitely short of the real truth. 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 147 

of the whole truth. If we throw together all the mutual 
love of the angels, of which doubtless among the various 
choirs there are many nameless varieties, if we cast into 
one all the passionate fidelity and heroic loyalty and burn- 
ing sentiment of all the husbands and wives, parents and 
children, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, that 
ever were, ever will be, or in the vast expanse of omnipo- 
tence ever can be, our total will be something inconceivably 
more short of the reality of God's love for us than the drop 
is short of the ocean, and the minute of eternity. If we 
multiply the same total by all the figures we can think of 
without losing our heads in the labyrinths of millions and 
billions, we shall not mend matters. When we have come 
to an end we have not got the shadow of an idea of the 
degree of fervor with which God loves us. And then if we 
contrived to comprehend the degree, where should we be in 
our reckoning ? There remains the fact that God's love of 
us is a different kind of love from any for which we have 
got a name. how it gladdens our souls to think that 
when we shall have been a million of years in the Bosom 
of our Heavenly Father, we shall still be sinking down 
deeper and deeper in that unknown sea of love, and be no 
nearer the bottom of its unfathomable truth and inexhausti- 
ble delights ! 

This is our third feature of it, that not even a glorified 
soul can ever understand it. The immaculate Mother of 
God at this hour is almost as ignorant of it as we are. 
Almost as ignorant, for there can scarcely be degrees in a 
matter which is infinite. The gigantic intelligence of St. 
Michael has been fathoming the depths of divine love 
through countless cycles of revolving ages, longer far than 
even those seemingly interminable geological epochs which 
men of science claim, and he has reported no soundings 
yet. And still, these endless calculations are the happy 
science of the Blest. Still, the saints on earth, in ardent 



148 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

contemplations, work this problem, which they know be- 
forehand they shall never solve. And we, who creep upon 
the ground, what better can we do than bewilder ourselves 
in these mazes of celestial love? For we shall still be 
learning to love God more, still learning to wonder more 
at what He has done for us, and to wonder, most of all, at 
the nothing which we do for Him. If even they who see 
God, cannot comprehend His love, what manner of love 
must it necessarily be? And yet it is ours, our own posses- 
sion ; and God's one desire is, by hourly influxes of grace, 
to increase that which is already incalculable, to enrich us 
with an apparently unspeakable abundance of that whose 
least degree is beyond the science of archangels, beyond the 
glory-strengthened eye of the Mother of God herself! 

It is another feature of this love, that it seems so to pos- 
sess God as to make Him insensible to reduplicated wrongs, 
and to set one attribute against another. At all costs love 
must be satisfied. There is nothing like God's love except 
God's unity. It is the whole of God. Mercy, the most ex- 
quisite, tender, delicate, susceptible mercy, must be risked 
by the permission of evil. That choice perfection of the 
Most High, His intolerably shining, unspotted, simple 
sanctity, must be exposed to inevitable outrage by the free- 
dom of created wills. Only love must be satisfied. The 
most stupendous schemes of redemption shall seem to tax 
the infinity of wisdom so as to satisfy justice, provided only 
that the satisfaction be not made at the expense of love. 
Love is the favorite. Love appears — Oh these poor human 
words ! — to stand out from the equality of the divine per- 
fections. Yet even love, for love's own sake, will come 
down from the eminence of its dignity. It will take man's 
love as a return for itself. It will consider itself paid by 
a kind of affectionate fiction. It will count that for a re- 
turn which bears no resemblance to the thing to be returned, 
either in kind or in degree. The mutual love of God and 



AVHY GOD LOVES US. 149 

man is truly a friendship, of which the reciprocity is all on 
one side. Compared to the least fraction of God's enormous 
love of us, what is all the collective love He receives from 
angels and from men, but as less than the least drop to the 
boundless sea ! And yet, in the divine exaggerations of 
His creative goodness, the whole magnificent machinery of 
a thousand worlds was a cheap price to pay for this. 

Hence we may well reckon as a fifth feature of this love, 
that its grandeur is a trial even to the faith which finds 
no difficulty in the Blessed Sacrament nor even in the mys- 
tery of the Undivided Trinity. If we have had to work for 
God as priests, have we not found more men puzzled and 
tempted by the love of God than by any other article of the 
faith ? Indeed most of the temptations against the faith, 
when properly analyzed, resolve themselves into tempta- 
tions arising from the seeming excesses of divine love. We 
might dare to say that God Himself, in spite of our daily 
prayer, leads us into temptation by His incredible good- 
ness. It is the excessive love of the Incarnation and the 
Passion, which make men find it hard to believe those mys- 
teries. It is the very inundation of love with which Mary 
is covered, which really makes her a stumbling block to 
proud or ill-established fiiith, or to enquiry which has not 
yet reached the strength of faith. The Blessed Sacrament 
is a difficulty, only because it is such an exceedingly beau- 
tiful romance of love. If God's love had not as it were con- 
strained Him to tell us so many of His incomprehensible 
secrets, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity would have been 
less fertile of objections. We confess it seems to us that he 
who, on reflection, can receive and embrace those two pre- 
positions, that God loves us, and that God desires our love, 
can find nothing difficult hereafter in the wonders of theo- 
logy. They exhaust and absorb all the possible objections 
a finite intellect can make to the incomprehensible dealings 
of its infinite Creator. how often in the fluent course of 



150 AVIIY GOD LOVES US. 

prayer does not this simple fact, that God is loving us, turn 
round and face us, and scatter all our thoughts, and strike 
us into a deep silence, and repeat itself out loud to us, and 
the soul answers not, and is not asleep and yet is not 
awake, and then the truth passes on, and we are left weak 
in every limb, and sweetly weary, as if we had been hard 
at work for hours upon some deep study or toilsome deed 
of charity ! We saw no vision : only God touched us, and 
we shrunk, and now are marvellously fatigued. 

Another feature of this love is that it is eternal, which is 
in itself an inexplicable mystery. As there never was a 
moment when God was not, in all the plenitude of His self- 
sufficient majesty, so there was never a moment when He 
did not love us. He loved us not only in the gross, as His 
creatures, not only as atoms in a mass, as units in a multi- 
tude, all grouped together and not taken singly. But He 
loved us individually. He loved us with all those distinc- 
tiorfS and individualities which make us ourselv s, and pre- 
vent our being any but ourselves. As the Eternal Genera- 
tion of the Son and the Eternal Procession of the Holy 
Ghost were in God what are called in theology necessary 
acts ; because without them God would not be One God in 
Three Persons ; so His eternal love of us was God's first free 
act. It was the glorious liberty of God spreading beyond 
Himself in the form of creative love. What is predestina- 
tion but the determining of this sweet liberty by almighty 
love ? What is our election but the eternal embrace of our 
Creator's unbeginning love ? Ever since He was God, and 
He was always God, He has been caressing us in the com- 
placency of His delighted foresight. We were with Him 
before ever the planets or the stars were made, before an- 
gelic spirit had yet streamed out of nothing, or the hollow 
void been bidden to build up millions of round worlds of 
ponderous material substance. What must a love be like 
which has been eternal and immutable ? And is it simply 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 151 

to be believed that I, a speck in the world, a point in time, 
a breath of being, f\iinting back into my original nothing- 
ness every moment, only that an act of God's will and 
influx keeps me in life by force, that I, most intellectually 
conscious to myself that I have never of myself done or said 
one worthy, one unselfish thing, one thing that was not vile 
and mean ever since I was born, that I, such as I am, or 
even such as I may hope to be, have really been loved by 
God with an everlasting love ? Why, what mean all those 
controversies about the counsels of perfection ? Is it possi- 
ble that God's children can be talking together, to see how 
much they are obliged to do for God, and how little is 
enough to save them ? Yes ! yes ! eternal love allows even 
this, brooks even this, and to all appearance is content ! 
If we will not give, God will bargain with us, and buy. 
inexplicable love ! Thy doings are almost a scandal to be 
put into words ! 

Once more. The seventh feature of this love which God 
bears us, is that it is in every way worthy of Himself, and 
the result of His combined perfections. It would be of 
course an intolerable impiety to suppose the contrary. 
Nay rather, it is the most perfect of His perfections. His 
attribute of predilection, if we might dare so to speak. If 
it be a finite love, where is its limit? If it went to the 
Crucifixion, if it comes daily to the Tabernacle, who can 
^ay where it will not go, if need should be? Jesus has 
more than once told His saints that He would willingly be 
crucified over again for each separate soul of man. Where 
can such love stop? If it be a love short of immense, who 
has ever exhausted it? Who ever will exhaust it ? Look 
at it in heaven at this moment — oh that we too were there ! 
— it is rolling like boundless silver oceans into countless 
spirits and unnumbered souls. How Mary's sinless heart 
drinks in the shining and abounding waters ! How the 
Sacred Heart of Jesus seem to embrace and appropriate 



152 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

the whole gracious inundation in itself! A few years, and 
you will be there yourself, and still the same vast flood of 
love. Ages will pass uncounted, and still the fresh tides 
will roll. is not this an immensity of love ? beautiful 
gateway of death ! thou art a very triumphal arch for the 
souls whom Jesus has redeemed. 

If His love be mutable, when did it change ? Is a whole 
past eternity no warrant for its perseverance ? Is not 
fidelity its badge and token, a fidelity which is like no cre- 
ated thing, although we call it by a human name? If it 
be not eternal, when did it begin, and when will it end? 
The day of judgment, which will be the end of so many 
things, will only be the beginning of a fresh abundance of 
this love. If it were a love less than omnipotent, could it 
have created worlds, could it have assumed a created nature 
to an uncreated Person, could it have accomplished that 
series of marvels required in the consecration of the Blessed 
Sacrament ? Could it have been unhurt by the coldness of 
men, or unimpaired by their rebellion ? Is it not a wise 
love? Shall we dare to say even of its excesses that they 
are inconsistent with faultless wisdom ? Had its wisdom 
been at all less than inexhaustible, could it have accom- 
plished the redemption of mankind as it has done, could it 
have distributed grace with such profound and unerring 
decision, could it have made the complicated arrangements 
of a vast universe testify so uniformly of itself, could it 
judge the world when the time shall come ? Is it in any 
way an imperfect love ? Where does it fail ? What pur- 
pose does it not fulfil ? To whom does it not extend ? For 
what need is it not sufficient ? Is it an unholy love ? The 
very thought were blasphemy. On the contrary it is the 
very highest expression of God^s inefi'able holiness. Is it 
not also a benignant love? a merciful love? a just love? 
Is it not a love which directs the whole providence of God, 
and makes His absolute dominion over us our most perfect 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 153 

freedom ? And finally, is it not its very characteristic that 
it should be itself our end, our reward, our consummate 
joy in God ? Thus it is the result of His combined perfec- 
tions, a sort of beautiful external parable of His incom- 
municable unity. 

But not only is love the preacher of God^s unity ; it ex- 
pounds the Trinity as well. Let us confine ourselves to the 
single act of Creation. The Eternal Generation of the Son 
is produced by God's knowledge of Himself. The Eternal 
Procession of the Holy Spirit is produced by His love of 
Himself. The Father's knowledge of Himself produces a 
divine Person, coequal, coeternal, consubstantial with Him- 
self. The love of the Father and the Son produces also a 
divine Person, coequal, coeternal, consubstantial with the 
Other Two, from whom, as from a single principle. He ever- 
lastingly proceeds. Now see how with awful distinctness 
creation shadows forth and adumbrates this adorable and 
surpassing mystery, how the free acts of God outside Him- 
self are shadows cast by the necessary acts within Himself. 
Creation is in a sort a son of God, a mighty family of sons, 
expressing more or less partially His image, representing 
His various perfections, and all with sufficient clearness to 
enable the apostle to say that we are without excuse if we 
do not perceive the Invisible by the things that are seen. 
Creation is a knowledge of God, a manifestation of Him 
given forth by Himself, and which, when complete, He 
viewed with divine complacency. But creation is espe- 
cially a knowledge and manifestation of God's love ; it is 
His love to us, and our love to Him. He created us be- 
cause He loved us, and He created us in order that we 
might love Him. Creation was itself the external jubilee 
of that immense perfection, of which the inward jubilee 
was the everlastingly proceeding Spirit. As the image of 
God's perfections, Creation was the faint shadow of that 
most gladdening mystery, the Eternal Generation of the 



154 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

Son : and Scripture lays stress on the fact that God pro- 
duced the worlds by His Son. As the communication of 
His love, and the love of His own glory, Creation also 
dimly pictured that unspeakable necessity of the divine 
life, the Eternal Procession of the Spirit. We have already 
seen that Creation was only and altogether love. As the 
Son is produced by the inward uncreated knowledge which 
God has of Himself; and as the Holy Spirit is produced by 
the inward uncreated love of God, so is Creation His out- 
ward and created love. Creation is a mirror of His perfec- 
tions to Himself, as well as to His creatures ; this must be 
always borne in mind ; and as He is His own end, and seeks 
necessarily His own glory. Creation is His love of Himself 
strongly and sweetly attaining its end through His love of 
His creatures and their love of Him. Perhaps all the works 
of God have this mark of His Triune Majesty upon them, 
this perpetual forthshadowing of the Generation of the Son 
and the Procession of the Spirit, which have been, and are, 
the life of God from all eternity. Nature, grace, and glory, 
the Incarnation, the Blessed Sacrament, and the Beatific 
Vision, may thus perhaps all be imprinted with this mark 
of God, the emblem, the device, the monogram, of the 
Trinity in Unity. And thus, when the Word has enlight- 
ened every man that comes into the world, and the Spirit 
has brought all hearts to loving obedience and accepted 
sanctity, through the grace of the Sacred Humanity of 
Jesus, it is mysteriously written by the apostle, that our 
Lord shall deliver up the kindom to God and the Father, 
and the Son also Himself shall be subject in His human 
nature unto Him that put all things under Him, that God 
may be all in all. The Father has created us, the Son re- 
deemed us, and the Holy Ghost sanctified us ; and when 
the Son and the Holy Spirit have brought us from our 
wanderings, the Father shall give Himself to us, and then, 
as the apostle said to Jesus, It suffices us. Then will His 



AVHY GOD LOVES US. 155 

iove be perfected, His most dear will accomplished, and 
His Creation crowned. 

The likeness of Creation to the Generation of the Son and 
the Procession of the Holy Ghost is still more striking, 
when we come to consider the real nature of that per- 
petual and intimate conservation by which God sustains 
and preserves all things. Creation and preservation are 
not two different actions. They can be separated only in 
idea. The one is the going on of the other. It is an 
opinion which has found favor in the schools, and which is 
peculiarly in harmony with the language of the ancient 
fathers, that no less an influx of God is required to pre- 
serve a thing in being than to call it at first out of its 
original nothingness. In treating of this question theolo- 
gians necessarily came to examine the real character of the 
act of Creation. Durandus expressly says, "As it is 
always true in divine things to say that the Son is ever 
being begotten of the Father, so is it true to say of the 
creature, as long as it exists, that it has been created and 
is being created by God ; for the creation of things is the 
same act as the preservation of them.'' Scotus says, "A 
thing may be always said to be being created, as long as it 
abides, because it is always receiving its being from God,'^ 
and he quotes S. Augustine as saying that " with respect 
to God a creature is never ultimately made, but is always 
being made.'' Yasquez declares that "the continuous pre- 
servation of things by God is a true creation out of 
nothing." Molina says, " By the same influx of an in- 
divisible action by which God first conferred being upon 
an angel, He also now preserves him, and confers the 
same being upon him throughout the whole course of 
time." Suarez in his Metaphysics teaches the same doc- 
trine. Lessius says, *'A created thing is nothing else than 
an assiduous creation and actual production of its being :" 
and Scotus again marvellously says, " Created essence of 



156 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

any kind is nothing else than a dependence upon God/' It 
is needless to point out how this indivisible continuity of 
Creation adumbrates the perpetual Generation of the Son, 
and the incessant Procession of the Holy Ghost."^^ 

Such is the love of God ; such its character and its 
degree. This is the love He is loving us with at this very 
moment : a love passing all example, a love rising above all 
created loves, a love which even a glorified spirit cannot 
understand, a love which seems to govern God, a love that 
tries our faith from its sheer immensity, a love which is 
eternal, and a love which is in every way worthy of God 
Himself, and the result of His combined perfections. Let 
us pause to think. At this very moment God is loving me 
with all that love. Lord ! I believe ; help Thou mine un- 
belief. what then are all things else to me? Pain or 
ease, sorrow or joy, failure or success, the wrongs of my 
fellow-creatures or their praise — what should they all be 
to me but matters of indifference? God loves me: now is 
the time to die ! 

* This very interesting question of preservation is discussed by Lessius in 
his third book, De Summo Bono; and then at greater length in his tenth 
book, De Perfectionibus Divinis. In the opinion given in the text that crea- 
tures bear on them the mark, not only of a Creator, but of a Triune Creator, 
I have ventured to differ from De Lugo. The whole subject is one of great 
interest ; but I cannot do more thau advert to it here. It is common with 
theologians to regard our Blessed Lady as a world by herself, a sort of exem- 
plar and epitome of creation; and the following passage from F. Binet's 
Chef-d'-(Euvre de Dieu illustrates the view I have put forward in the text. 
Speaking of our Lady's soul, he says, IS'est-elle pas veritablement le miroir de 
la Majeste de Dieu, representant naivement ce qui se passe dans les splendeurs 
de I'eternite, oil par une generation eternelle est engendre le Fils dans le 
sein de son Pere, ou, par une emanation ineffable, le Saint-Esprit procede du 
Pere et du Pils? Partie lere. cap. 5, sect. 11. — See also the conclusion of S. 
Thomas in the 45th question, vii. article of the P. Prima. In rationalibus 
creaturis est imago Trinitatis ; in caeteris vero creaturis est vestigium Trini- 
tatis; in quantum in eis inveniuntur aliqua, quo reducuntur in Personas 
Divinas. Since writing the passage in the text I have found the same view- 
in some hitherto unedited works of Kuysbrok. published by Arnswaldt at 
Hanover, 1818. The treatise is entitled Spiegel du Seliglceit. 



WHY GOD LOYES US. 157 

But we have next to seek for the reasons of this love. 
They must be either on our side, or on God^s side, or on 
both. Let us examine our own side first. 

The first thing which strikes us is that man is in himself 
nothingness. His body has been formed of the dust of the 
earth, and his soul has been directly created out of nothing 
by God Himself. Consequently we can have nothing 
original in us to attract this love of our Creator. Nay, the 
very act of our creation showed that His love for us ex- 
isted before we did ourselves. Our very being was because 
of His love. This consideration alone would seem to 
settle the question of man's independent possession of any 
title to the love of God. We have simply nothing of our 
own, nothing but the disgrace of our origin. There is not 
a gift of our nature but, if God loves it. He is only loving 
what is His own, and which in the first instance came to 
us from His love. There can be nothing therefore in our 
own being to love us for, when that very being is nothing 
more than the effect of a pre-existing love. 

Moreover when God had once called us into life, our 
extreme littleness seems a bar against any claim to His 
love, founded on what we are in ourselves. We are only a 
speck even amidst rational creatures. What are we in- 
dividually? AVhat is our importance in our country, or 
even our neighborhood ? What is our moral or our in- 
tellectual greatness ? We are almost lost in the number 
of men who are now living on the earth. Our leaving it, 
which must happen one day, will hardly be perceived. We 
shall leave no gap behind us. We shall hardly want a 
successor, for what will there be to succeed to ? And if we 
are mere atoms in the huge mass of men now living, what 
are we compared to all the multitudes of men who have 
ever lived, or the enormous hosts who are yet to live before 
the judgment-day? And after the judgment-day, if God 
goes on filling the immensity of space, and the numberless 

o 



158 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

orbs of the nightl}^ heavens, with new rational creations, 
new subjects for the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, more 
angels, or more men, or beings that shall be neither angels 
nor men, we shall become imperceptible motes in the 
great beams of creative love. And even now there are the 
angels, and who shall tell their number? For we know 
that multitudinousness is one peculiar magnificence of 
their glorious choirs. It is even said that the lowest 
choir, which is the least in number, far outnumbers all 
the men that shall have been born from Adam to the 
day of doom. What have we to present to the eye of our 
Creator but an almost indescribable insignificance ? 

If there is anything positive about us at all, it is our 
badness. To our nothingness we have contrived to add re- 
bellion. That really is something of our own. We have 
thoroughly mastered with our understandings the difierence 
between right and wrong, and have deliberately chosen 
the last and rejected the first. We have looked God^s com- 
mandments in the face, and then broken them. Grace 
has come to us with quite a sensible heat and force, and 
we have summoned up our power of will, and resisted it. 
The Holy Ghost has spoken, and we have listened, and 
then returned an answer in the negative. Conscience 
has proclaimed the rights of duty, and without so much as 
taking the trouble to deny the assertion, we have refused 
obedience to the mandate. We have looked calmly at 
eternal punishment, we have clearly perceived that nothing 
short of an omnipotence of anger has been required for 
the creation of those unutterable tortures, and then for 
an hour of sin we have braved it all. Time after time 
we have put God in one scale, and some creature in the 
other, and then of our own will have pressed down the 
scale, and made the creature outweigh the Creator. We 
have neglected God and outraged Him also. We have at 
once disobeyed Him and forgotten Him. We have both 



WHY GOD LOVE US. 159 

ignored Him and yet have insulted Him as well. All 
this is our own. There is no one to share it with us. 
Truly we are wonderful creatures, to have done so much 
in so short a time, to be able indeed to do such things at 
all. Yet are we making out a very promising case for a 
title to eternal love ? 

We have said, there was no one to share the&e miserable 
prerogatives with us. It is true, and yet it is not true 
either. For think awhile. Has not Jesus at least offered 
to share them ? There have been times when their real 
nature, their awful wretchedness, came home to us, and a 
world would have been a cheap payment to get rid of the 
guilty past. To be a door-keeper in the house of God seemed 
then an infinitely better lot than a thousand years amid the 
splendors of ungodliness. And Jesus came to us in one 
of those times. He offered to take all this horrible accu- 
mulation of re])ellion and self-will, and to make it His own, 
and to give His sufferings for it, and to pay His Blood to 
ransom us from the intolerable debt of fire, which we had 
wilfully and scornfully incurred. And we were too glad to 
accept an offer of such almost fabulous love. And then in 
a little while, leaving all that old debt on Him, we left His 
service also. We took back our rights ; we re-entered upon 
the exercise of our unhappy prerogatives ; and trampling 
mercy under foot now, in addition to the other divine per- 
fections we had outraged before, we once more earned for 
ourselves an endless death, and preferred to the holy love 
of God the blackness of everlasting fire. And perhaps this 
process has been repeated a score of times, in our short 
lives, or a score of scores of times. And certainly such 
conduct is all our own. An angel never had the opportu- 
nity given him of such new choice of evil. Here is the first 
time in which we come in sight of anything which belongs 
undoubtedly to ourselves as men; and it were strange in- 



160 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

deed if such excess of guilt should be the blissful cause of 
such exceeding love. 

But if, instead of being such quite incredible sinners, 
we were equal both in our faculties and our innocence to 
the highest angels, should we be much better able to estab- 
lish our right and title to the inestimable love of God? 
"What can we do for God ? What can we add to Him ? 
What can we give Him, which He does not possess already, 
and possess to an infinite extent and with an infinite enjoy- 
ment ? Is there one of His perfections to which we could 
put a heightening touch, an additional beauty? Could we 
by any possible contribution of ours swell the overflowing 
ocean of His glory? Is there a little joy, however little, 
which we can give Him, and which is not His already? 
We could not even be of any real help to Him in the go- 
vernment of the world. If He condescended to make use 
of our ministrations we should only add to the weight on 
the shoulder of His omnipotence, not take anything from 
it. For He would have to concur to every act we did, to 
every movement we made. He would have actively to fill 
our nothingness with life, to fortify our feebleness with 
strength, to illuminate our darkness with His light. The 
most magnificent of the angels is no help to God. On the 
contrary, if we may use the word, he is rather a drain upon 
Him. For the creature thirsts for the influx of the Creator, 
and the more capacious his nature the more vast are his 
needs, to be supplied from the undiminished plenitude of 
God. When God lets His creatures work for Him, it is 
rather that they make more work for Him to do, as children 
do when they pretend to help their father. It is a conde- 
scension, an honoring of the creature, the clearest proof 
of God^s exceeding love for us. Thus though St. MichaePs 
brightness dazzles us, while we look at it, until we gaze 
upon it through the many-colored veil of a creature's ne- 
cessary imperfections, we can see even in him no right or 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 161 

title to his Creator's love, except the gifts which that love 
placed there first of all. But we are not St. Michael. We 
are not magnificent angels. We are but the most miserable 
of men, relapsed sinners, even now perhaps only half re- 
pentant, with a most cowardly repentance. 

If then we must judge of ourselves by human rather 
than angelic principles, let us apply these human measures 
to our actual service of our Maker. What is our service 
of God like? What is its worth, what its true character? 
Let us for a moment put aside from God the consideration 
that He is God. He is our Father, our Master, our Bene- 
factor, our fondly-loving Friend. In His immense longevity 
He has been busy doing us good. It seems to have been 
His one occupation. He lived for us. We were His end. 
Words cannot tell the amount of self-sacrifice He has made 
for us. He slew an only Son to keep us out of harm. 
Figures could not put down the number of graces He has 
given and is hourly giving to us. His life will be prolonged, 
not for His own sake, but for ours, some more centuries, 
in order that He may go on and complete the sum of His 
prodigious benefactions. It is not easy to tell what He has 
been to us. We feel that we do not half know it ourselves. 
Suffice it to say that this ancient earth has never seen a 
Father like this Father, or a Master half so kind or half so 
like an equal, or a Benefactor more prodigal or more self- 
forgetting, or a Friend more ardently romantic in His at- 
tachment. And we have all this love to return. And how 
do we return it? A certain amount of pious feeling, a 
scant obedience of a few easy commandments, a respect for 
His expressed wishes when they do not too much clash with 
our own interests, a fluctuating quantity of prayer and of 
thanksgiving, but which engrosses us so little that we are 
generally thinking of something else all the time. This is 
what we do for Kim in a very irregular and perfunctory 
kind of way. And if we ourselves were goodnatured human 
11 o2 



162 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

fathers, should we be satisfied if our sons did as much for 
us as we do for God, and no more? If a friend of seven 
jears' standing repaid thus our love and loyalty, should we 
not think his friendship and his service almost insulting ? 
Should we not think it so cold, so fitful, so self-seeking, so 
unjust, that, although charity hopes all things and believes 
all things, we should consider ourselves justified in saying 
that it would be utterly impossible, however disposed we 
might be to waive our rights and to stretch a point, to put 
a favorable construction upon the condu-ct of our friend ? 

But all the while it is God, not merely a friend and bene- 
factor, but God whom we are thus treating, with His ten 
thousand other ties upon us, and His incomparably greater 
tenderness, and His absolutely eternal love ! is it not 
humiliating to think of these things ? But we have not yet 
drunk our vileness to its dregs. While we are thus abusing 
the long-sufi'ering of God by our ungraceful slackness, by 
our injurious coldness, and by our insulting scantiness of 
service, we have the efi"rontery to persuade ourselves that 
we are doing some great thing for Him, that we are almost 
laying Him under an obligation to us, and that any one 
who urges upon us a higher perfection is a troublesome 
dreamer, who is far from doing justice to the reasonable 
and moderate profession of piety on which we pride our- 
selves. And all this to God, remembering who God is ! 
And all this after all He has done for us, and is doing now ! 
And all this, when we have so much of the criminal past 
to undo, so much lost time to make up, so much of actual 
rebellion to repair and expiate ! Surely it was not too 
much to say that even on human principles our very service 
of God is almost insulting, our very reparations a new 
afiront. If they be not so, to what is it owing but to the 
unlimited forbearance of Him upon whose paternal love 
experience teaches us we can with so much security pre- 
sume ? 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 163 

But if God is His own end, and by a sort of necessity 
cannot but seek His own glory in all things, it would seem 
as if to be like God would be a legitimate title to His love. 
He will look with complacency upon that which reflects 
Himself. Still if even on this account God loved men, it 
would be a reason rather on His side than on our own. 
Nevertheless let us see what the real truth of the matter is. 
We are the contradictory of God in almost every respect. 
To say nothing of the finiteness and feebleness belonging 
to us as creatures, our moral qualities present a more fear- 
ful dissimilarity from His holiness and perfection. We are 
deficient in the very virtues which we are able to acquire, 
and for the acquisition of which He has given us special 
aids of grace. Nay, when He has summed up all that shall 
entitle us to the forgiveness of our sins, all that shall win 
for us the very kindness and favor which we seek from 
Him, into one simple precept, and told us to forgive if we 
would be forgiven, and to do to others as we would He, as 
well as they, should do to us, our corrupt nature finds the 
simple lesson an infinite hardship in practice. Times have 
been, alas ! who will say those times are not now ? when 
the world^s sins have so sickened God that He has repented, 
immutable though He be, that He ever created man. And 
now what in all the world does He behold like Himself? 
Nothing but the grace He has planted there, like an ailing 
exotic in an uncongenial soil, stunted in growth, with a 
few pale leaves scarcely hanging on to its boughs, flowering 
hardly ever, and only under great forcing heat, and bearing 
fruit in this climate never? Is that the heavenly tree? 
Oh ! who would know it in such woful plight ? Of a truth 
God has much to bear not to be downright ofi'ended with 
the grace He sees on earth, to say little of the nature there, 
and still less of the prolific sin. We know our own hearts 
far too well : and can we believe that God can look down 
from heaven, and see Himself reflected there ? Earth has 



164 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

but one consolation. Truly there is something on man's 
side, something which is man^s own, on which God's eye 
can rest, and love not only what it sees, but be so ravished 
thereby, that it will pour itself out in floods, and run over, 
and deluge the universe with light and loveliness, and that 
sight which is man's own, though it is not in man, is the 
Blessed Sacrament, where the patience of God securely 
rest its foot, and the divine anger rests, and sleeps sweetly, 
and wakes not to remember its errand of vindictive purity. 
There is one characteristic of man which especially pre- 
cludes our finding in him the reasons of God's amazing 
love. It is not exactly sin. It is not precisely any one of 
the imperfections to which as a finite being he is subject. 
It is rather the combined result of all his imperfections. 
He is characterized by meanness. When we do really 
great things, we fail in some little point of them. There is 
a flaw of meanness running across our generosity, and 
debasing every one of its products. Our love and hatred, 
our praise and blame, our anger and our good-humor, have 
all got the same crack in them, this flaw of meanness. 
With ourselves, what is self-deceit but meanness, what is 
slavery to bodily comforts, what greediness at meals, what 
rudeness in manners, what personal vanity, what a hundred 
idle extravagances of self-praise in which we daily indulge, 
what the inexhaustible pettiness of wounded feeling, but 
meanness, downright meanness? In our intercourse with 
others, what is lying but meanness, what are pretence, 
selfishness, irritability, and more than half the world's con- 
ventions, but meanness, systematized meanness ? In our 
relations with God, what are lukewarmness, and hypocrisy, 
and self-righteousness, but meanness? what is venial sin but 
miserable meanness ? Many a man, who has found it hard 
to hate himself, when he looked only at his sins, has found 
the task much easier when he had the courage to hold close 
to his eyes for a good long while the faithful picture of his 



WHY GOD LOYES US. 165 

incredible meanness. what a piercing, penetrating vision 
it is, running all through us with a cold sharpness, when 
grace lets us see how low and vile, how base and loathsome, 
how little and how sneaking — forgive the word, we cannot 
find another — we are in everything. Everybody seems 
so good, except ourselves ; and we, so intolerably hate- 
ful, so ugly, so repulsive, such a burden to ourselves ! 
And if this can be made plain to our dull, gross sight, 
what must it be to the clear penetration of the All-holy 
Majesty of God? 

But. surely it is useless going on. We have doubtless by 
this time lost sight of all claims to love, which we might 
have fancied we had when we started. It is plain that the 
reasons for God^s love of man are not at all to be found on 
our side, and therefore they must be on the side of God. 
If any truth in the world is established, this is. Certainly 
the extremity of our lowness may be the measure of the 
height of God^s love, but it cannot furnish us with the 
reason of it. We are often tempted, when reflecting on 
these matters, to say shortly that God loves us because we 
are so peculiarly unloveable. This may do well enough 
for a paradox in the pulpit to strike sleepy auditors; 
but we must go deeper down than this when we read or 
meditate. 

Now every one of the reasons for God's loving us being 
on His side, not on ours, is it not remarkable that in our 
service of God we should feel as if it were a bargain be- 
tween two more or less equal parties, and that if we did 
our share the other would be held to do his ? We do not 
at all realize the spiritual life as an intercourse where all 
the duty is on one side, and all the liberality on the other. 
Yet surely it must be so. If certain things are due to us 
as creatures, when once we have been created, so that God 
would not be God, if lie did not give them, yet that we 
were created at all was an immense gratuitous love. If He 



166 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

condescends to make a covenant with us, yet it is of His 
own free love that He stoops to bind Himself; and again 
love, eternal love, must first have created us, before we 
could exist to be parties to a covenant. So that all is love. 
The analysis of creation resolves itself simply into love. 
Moreover what would become of us, if God gave us nothing 
but our due, or if He kept His munificence within the 
limits of His strict covenant? Is not His love breathing 
out everywhere, and breaking down our pride into humility, 
as the summer rain beats down the fragile flower, while we 
are weighing with minutest scales each ounce, and drachm, 
and scruple, of the miserable alloy with which we are pay- 
ing Him under the sweet-sounding name of love ? 

So far then is clear, that all the reasons for God's love of 
us are to be found exclusively on His side. No reasons 
whatever exist on ours. It is still a further inquiry what 
these reasons are ; and one to which we must now betake 
ourselves. Alas ! with our puny minds it is a hopeless 
inquisition to search through the vast recesses of the Divine 
Nature to find the reasons of God's love. God Himself is 
love, simple love ; and we may well suppose that if we 
might question each one of His perfections, the answer 
from them all would still be love. We are so sure of this 
that we do not anticipate any difficulty. Yet when we 
come to make the trial, the results are not altogether ac- 
cording to our expectations. 

There are few of God's attributes more beautiful or more 
adorable than His justice. There is no justice like His, for 
it is founded on His own divine nature, not on any obliga- 
tions by which He is bound. Some of the saints have had 
a special devotion to His justice, and have made it in a 
peculiar manner the subject of their contemplations. An 
intelligent creature would rather be in the hands of God's 
justice, than at the mercy of the most loving of his fellow- 
creatures. The apostle tells us that the acceptance of our 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 167 

contrition and the forgiveness of our sins depends upon 
God^s justice. His distribution of the gifts of nature, grace, 
and glory, is the masterpiece of His justice, which alone 
and of itself could fill us with gladness and wonder for a 
whole eternity. His promises are the children of His jus- 
tice, and His fidelity to them is His exercise of that most 
royal attribute. It is because His love is so great a love, 
that His justice is so perfect and so pure. His punish- 
ments even are at once magnificent to look at, yet most 
dreadful to endure, because of the extremity of their unal- 
terable, and comprehensive and truthful justice. Even the 
vengeance of our God is a subject which love trembles to 
contemplate, but from which it will not turn away ! His 
justice moreover, even in the acceptance of our works, is a ^ 
justice due to His own perfections rather than to the efforts 
of our misery ; for what He receives from us is much more 
His own than ours. And is there a sight more exalting or 
more affecting amid all the wonders of theology than to see 
the beautiful, the faultless rigor of divine justice satisfied 
to its utmost demand, its enormous and most holy require- 
ments paid in full, and its dread loveliness and majestic 
sternness worshipped with an equal worship, by the Pre- 
cious Blood and the mysterious Passion of our Blessed Lord 
and Saviour Jesus Christ, God and Man ? He has hardly 
begun to know God who has not addicted himself, with 
humility and fear, his mind hushed and his heart in his 
hand, to the study of God's tremendous justice. But is it 
there that we can look for the reason of His love ? Was 
our creation a debt of justice due to our original justice ? 
Has our use of the gifts of nature, or our correspondence 
to the calls of grace, been such, that we dare to call on God 
to come and note it with all His justice, and pay it accord- 
ing to the rigor of its merits ? Listen to the sweet lamen- 
tation that issues evermore from the souls of purgatory 
through the breathing-places of the Church on earth,— is it 



168 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

not more true ? Lord, if Thou shalt be extreme to mark 
"what is done amiss, Lord ! who shall abide it ? Of a truth 
we must be well clothed with the grace and justice of Jesus, 
before we shall dare to say with Job of old, Let Him weigh 
me in the balance of His justice. Surely if justice alone 
were to be concerned, we should look for punishment rather 
than for love. 

In the seventeenth century a succession of holy men 
were raised up in France, w^ho were drawn by the Holy 
Spirit to honor with a peculiar intensity and devotion the 
sanctity of God, and by the same unerring instincts of 
grace they were led to couple -with this devotion a special 
attraction to the spirit of the priesthood of Jesus. Let us 
approach this attribute of sanctity, and see if we can find 
there the reason for God^s exceeding love of creatures. 
God- is infinite holiness, because He is essential purity. 
Who can stand before the blaze of such a blinding light ? 
He is holy, because the Divine Essence is the root and 
fountain of all holiness. He is holy because He is the 
rule, the model, the exemplar of all holiness. He is holy, 
because He is the object of all holiness, which can be 
nothing else than love of God and union with Him. He is 
holy, because He is the principle of all holiness, inasmuch 
as He infuses it into angels and men, and as He is the last 
end to which all their holiness is inevitably directed. He 
is infinitely holy, because He is infinitely loveable ; and as 
all holiness consists in the love of God, so God's holiness 
consists in the love of Himself. Thus, and what an ador- 
able mystery it is ! the infinite purity of God is simply His 
self-love. We know not if a creature can gain a higher 
idea of God than is given out by this stupendous truth. 

But let us suppose that we are ever so holy, how will this 
created holiness stand by the side of that of God? He is 
holy in Himself, and of Himself, holy in essence, w'hich it 
is impossible for a creature to be. To no creature, says theo- 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 169 

logy, can it be natural to be the son of God, to be impecca- 
ble, to have the Holy Ghost, and to see the Divine Nature. 
Our holiness consists in gifts gratuitously superadded to the 
feebleness and impossibilities of our finite nature. The 
holiness of God is substantial. His own very substance ; ours 
is but a quality and an accessory, an illumination of mind 
and impulse of will imparted to us by Himself. God is 
holy infinitely, both in intensity and in extent. Whereas 
we have, alas ! no words low enough to express the extreme 
littleness, the deplorable languor, the soon exhausted capa- 
city, of our brightest and most burning holiness. The 
holiness of God can neither grow nor be diminished. It 
cannot grow, because it is already infinite. It cannot be 
diminished, because it is His Essence. Ours is but a speck, 
whose very nature, hope, and efi'ort it is to grow. The holi- 
ness of Mary might grow for centuries with tenfold the 
rapidity that her vast merits grew on earth, and at the end 
she would be as little near the holiness of God as she is 
now. God's sanctity is eternal, ours but of a year or two ; 
perhaps it began quite late in life. God's sanctity is unin- 
telligible from its excess of purity and its depths of un- 
spotted light ; ours, alas ! a fellow-creature could see 
through and appreciate in less than half an hour. The 
holiness of God is inefi'ably fruitful: for it is the cause 
which originates, preserves, sets the example, and gives the 
aim to all created holiness whatsoever. Ours is fruitful, 
too, for holiness, as such, must be fruitful : but how little 
have we done, how many souls have we taught to know 
God and to love Him ? If the scandal and edification we 
have given were put into the scales, which would weigh 
down the other ? 

All this on the supposition that we are as holy as we 
might be. But we are not so. We are hardly holy at all* 
And knowing ourselves to be what we are, is it possible for 
us to conceive that infinite sanctity bade love create us out 

p 



170 V/HY GOD LOVES US. 

of nothing, because it was so enamored of what it foresaw 
we should become ? The holiness of God has no necessary 
respect to creatures, as His mercy has : and yet, strange to 
say ! it is this seemingly most inimitable of all His attri- 
butes, which is expressly put before us as the object of our 
imitation. We are to be holy because God is holy, and 
perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect. Do we then 
so represent and reflect this sanctity of God, as to become 
the object of such exuberant affection? If it were only to 
God's holiness that we might appeal, should we expect to 
find there the reason of His love ? Nay, if we had not 
truer views of God's equality, could we not more easily 
fimcy omnipotent love required to hinder infinite holiness 
from turning away from us in displeasure and aversion ? 
What did David mean when he said in the eighty-fifth 
psalm, first of all, Incline Thine ear, Lord, and hear me, 
for I am needy and poor, and then, Preserve my soul for I 
am holy? He was a man after God's heart: but what 
manner of men are we? Yet, while he was pleading his 
own holiness,* it was not to the holiness of God he was 
appealing ; for he adds, For Thou, Lord, art sweet and 
mild, and plenteous in mercy to all that call upon Thee. 

Is it the divine beauty which is so in love wuth us mise- 
rable creatures ? Yet how shall we search the unsearchable 
loveliness of God? One momentary flash of His beauty 
would separate body and soul by the vehemence of the ec- 
stasy which it would cause. We shall need to be fortified 
with the mysterious strength of the light of glory, before 
in the robust freshness of our immortality we can lie and 
look upon that beauty tranquil and unscathed. We shall 
see before us in living radiance, in the light of its own in- 
comprehensibility, in the shapeliness of its own immensity, 
infinite light and infinite power, infinite wisdom with infi- 
nite sweetness, infinite joy and infinite glory, infinite majes- 

* Many commentators suppose him to allude to his consecration as king. 



WUY GOD LOVES US. 171 

ty with infinite holiness, infinite riches with an infinite sea 
of being ; we shall behold it not only containing all real 
and all imaginary and all possible goods, but containing 
them in the most eminent and unutterable manner, and not 
only so, but containing them, breathless exhibition of 
most ravishing supernal beauty ! in the unity of a most 
transcending and majestic simplicity ; and this illimitable 
vision is in its totality the beauty of the Divine Nature ; 
and what we see, though we call it it, is not a thing, but 
Him, a Being, Him, our Creator, Three Persons, One God. 
This Beauty is God, the beautiful God ! how we our- 
selves turn to dust and ashes, nay, to loathsome death and 
corruption, when we think thereon ! We were going to say 
that God has His beauty from Himself, we ours from Him; 
that His was illimitable, ours almost imperceptible; that 
His was within, ours borrowed from without; that His 
could neither grow nor fade, while ours is a vague, uncer- 
tain, fluctuating shadow : but is it not more true to say 
that we have no beauty whatsoever ? my heart ! my 
heart ! how loudly art thou telling me to stop, for, as for 
infinite beauty, unless it might be infinitely deceived, it 
could only be revolted by thy guilt and wretchedness ! 

Infinite wisdom must have strangely forgotten itself, if it 
can be in love with us for our own sakes. The most fearful 
thing about the divine wisdom, and that which makes it so 
adorable is, that it is God^s knowledge of us in Himself. 
He does not look out upon us, and contemplate us, like an 
infinitely intelligent spectator, from without. But He looks 
into Himself, and sees us there, and knows us, as He knows 
all things, in the highest, deepest, and most ultimate causes, 
and judges of us with a truth, the light and infallibility of 
which are overwhelming and irresistible. St. Mary Mag- 
dalen of Pazzi examined her conscience out loud in an ec- 
stasy, and we look upon it as a supernatural monument of 
delicate self-knowledge. But what is the self-knowledge of 



172 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

an examination of conscience, by the side of God's instan- 
taneous, penetrating, and exhausting knowledge of us in 
Himself? That wisdom also is the capacious abyss in 
■which all the manifold beauties of possible creatures, and 
the magnificent worship of possible worlds, revolve in order, 
light, and number amidst the divine ideas. And what are 
we by the side of visions such as these ? As the flood of 
the noontide sun poured cruelly upon wounded eyes, so is 
the regard of God^s knowledge fixed sternly on the sinner's 
soul. Oh the excruciating agony it must be, added to the 
torments of the lost, to feel how nakedly and transparently 
they lie in the light of God's intolerable wisdom? Must 
not we too have some faint shadow of that feeling ? If the 
Sacred Humanity of Jesus did not cover our cold and na- 
kedness and shivering poverty as with a sacred mantle, or 
if we fell out from beneath it into the broad day of God's 
unsparing wisdom, we should surely faint away with fear 
and terror in the sense of our abject created vileness. 
Can we dream then that God loves us so well, because He 
knows us so thoroughly? no ! like little children must 
we hide our faces in the lap of our dearest Lord, and cry 
with half-stifled voice, Turn away Thy face from my sins, 
and blot out all my iniquities ! Infinite wisdom has almost 
taxed itself with ingenious desires to save our souls and to 
win our love ; and w^hat, in spite of all its curious array 
of graces and inventions, have we become ? and how can 
that wisdom look upon us and be otherwise than disap- 
pointed? And what must disappointment be like in God? 
That which is most like a limit to Omnipotence, is the 
free will of man ; and that which looks most like a failure 
in unfailing power, is the scantiness of the love which God 
obtains from man. We have no words to tell the power of 
God. We have no ideas by the help of which we can so 
much as approach to an honorable conception of it. What 
a boundless field of wild speculation possible creatures and 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 173 

possible worlds open out to view! Yet all this does not aid 
us to imagine God^s unimaginable power. Possibility seems 
to us almost infinite, so widely does it reach, so much does 
it imply, so stupendous is the variety of operations within 
its grajsp. But a Being who is not bound by impossibility, 
to whom the impossible is no limit whatever, to whom no- 
thing is impossible, what can He be like ? We may heap 
up words for years, and we get no nearer to realizing what 
we mean. We have no picture of it in our minds. Now 
if, to such terrific power, there could be great or small, 
should not we be so small as to be contemptible in its 
sight, and so it would pass us over? But if we have re- 
strained this grand Omnipotence, if we have dared to 
brave its might, if we have ventured to try our strength 
with its strength, if we have dared to throw our wills as an 
obstacle beneath the rushing of its impetuous wheels, 
should we not expect, if God were only and simply power, 
that it would tread us out of life, trample us back into our 
darksome nothingness, and then onward, onward, onward 
still, upon its swift resplendent way through exhaustless 
miracles, uncounted worlds, and nameless fields of unima- 
ginable glory? 

God is truth, all truth, the only truth. Truth is the 
beauty of God, and His beauty is the plenitude of truth. 
Everything is what it is in the sight of God, and it is 
nothing else. Truth is the character of God^s mind, and 
the perfection of His goodness. All truth in creatures is 
a derivation from the truth of God. Everything in the 
divine ideas has a peculiar fitness and congruity which 
makes it worthy of Him, because it makes it truthful. 
God is truth, not only in Himself, absolute, unapproach- 
able truth, but He is especially truth as He is the exemplar 
of creatures. Whatever is true in them, is so because it is 
in accordance with Him, as their rule and pattern, or, as 
philosophers call it, their exemplary cause. The whole 

p2 



174 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

truth of creation is, therefore, in its conformity to God; 
and whatever is not conformed to Him is a distortion, a 
horror, and a lie. Yet there is, perhaps, none of the 
divine excellencies which more broadly distinguish the 
Creator from the creature, than this of truth ; none with 
which it is more important for us to communicate ; and 
none whose communication is more thoroughly supernatu- 
ral, or in which perseverance is more difficult. Moreover, 
so necessary to creation is this divine perfection in the 
Creator, that all creatures might say, by instinct as well as 
by inspiration, Let God be true and every man a liar. But, 
now, if truth, the only created truth, is likeness to God, 
conformity to God, a direct aiming at God, how far is there 
any truth in us ? How far do we differ from our original, 
how do we vary from our pattern, how do we swerve from 
the straight line, and are awkward in the hands of Him 
who builds the heavenly Jerusalem after the model of His 
truth ? Must not truth abhor that which is so untrue, as 
we know ourselves to be ? Is it not the case that, many a 
time in life, the Holy Ghost has wakened us up to a sense 
of our exceeding untruthfulness, so that we see our whole 
reality fading away in the darkness of hypocrisy, conceit, 
pretence, vainglory, intentional falsehood, half-deliberate 
diplomacy, circuitous insincerity, and unintended unavoid- 
able concealments, which yet make us be all the while 
acting a part, and seeming to be what we are not? Oh! 
we feel all miserable and shameful with the uncleanness 
of untruth, and love to think, in the agony of our self- 
hatred, that, at least, the eye of God sees through and 
through our dishonorable disguises, and pierces with his 
rays of light abysses we ourselves only suspect, and do not 
know, of the most undignified and monstrous self-deceit. 
Does God love us, then, because we are so truthful ? 

Let us ask our question of one more attribute, and then 
we will conclude our search. But how shall we speak of 



WHY GOD LOYES US. I7e5 

thee, beautiful mercy of God ! It is mercy which seems, 
above all things, to make us understand God. While the 
practise of it in reality makes the creature like the Creator, 
it seems to us as if, when He practised it, it made the Crea- 
tor like the creature. For it has about it an appearance 
of sadness and of sympathy, a pity, a self-sacrifice, a 
pathos, which belong to the nobility of a created nature. 
It makes God to be so fatherly, as if truly He sorrowed for 
His sons, and spoke kind words, and did gentle things, out 
of the exuberant affection of the pain He feels for our dis- 
tresses and our needs. How shall we define this golden 
attribute of mercy? Is it not the one perfection which we 
creatures give, or seem to give, to our Creator? How could 
He have mercy, were it not for us? He has no sorrows 
that want soothing, no necessities that need supplying ; for 
He is the ocean of interminable being. Mercy is the tran- 
quillity of His omnipotence and the sweetness of His 
omnipresence ; the fruit of His eternity and the compa- 
nion of His immensity; the chief satisfaction of His jus- 
tice ; the triumph of His wisdom ; and the patient perse- 
verance of His love. "Wherever we go, there is mercy : 
the peaceful, active, broad, deep, endless mercy of our 
heavenly Father. If we work by day, we work in mercy's 
light; and we sleep at night in the lap of our Father's 
mercy. The courts of heaven gleam with its outpoured 
prolific beauty. Earth is covered with it, as the waters 
cover the bed of the stormy sea. Purgatory is, as it were, 
its own separate creation ; and is lighted by its gentle 
moonlight, gleaming there soft and silvery through night 
and day. Even the realm of hopeless exile is less palpably 
dark than it would be, did not some excesses of mercy's 
light enter even there. 

^\ hat but mercy could have divined the misery of non- 
existence, and then have called in Omnipotence and love 
to build a universe, and fill it full of life? This was its 



176 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

first essay. Yet, as if, in the very instant of peopling no^ 
thingness with angelic and with human life, it outstripped 
itself, and was not content with its mighty work, it raised 
its creation to a state of grace simultaneously with its state 
of nature. Then, wdien the human race perversely fell from 
this supernatural order, and drifted away from God, to 
deluge the world with grace was not enough for mercy. 
It brought down from heaven the Person of the Eternal 
Word, and united it to human nature, that so it might 
redeem the world with the marvels, almost incredible mar- 
vels, of a truly divine redemption. Anything, therefore, 
might be asked of mercy. It might be asked to furnish 
the reasons of the Creator^s love. Yet, if we may say so, 
mercy seems to be but one method of His love. His love 
is, somehow, wider than His mercy, although His mercy is 
simply inilr>ite. Mercy is one of His perfections, while 
love is the harmony of all. Mercy does not tire of us, does 
not despair of us, does not give over its pursuit of us, takes 
no offence, repays evil with good, and is the ubiquitous 
minister of the Precious Blood of Jesus. But love seems 
more than this. Love fixes upon each of us, individualizes 
us, is something personal. Love is just and equitable no 
less than kind, is wise as well as powerful. Love is tan- 
tamount to the whole of God, and is co-extensive with Him. 
Mercy is something by itself. Love is the perfection of the 
Uncreated in Himself. Mercy is the character of the Crea- 
tor. Mercy pities, spares, makes allowances, condescends. 
But love rewards, honors, elevates, equalizes with itself, 
ihe idea of predilection does not enter into mercy, whereas, 
It is ihe secret life of love. We do not know; but it does 
not feoem as if mercy quite answered the question we are 
asking. And yet, if mercy is not the reason of God's love, 
where else shail we find it in His infinity? 

But it is time to close. We have seen with what a love 
it is that God loves us, and we have asked whv it is He loves 



WHY GOD LOVES US. 177 

US. It must be for reasons to be found either on man's side 
or on God's side. Xot on man's side ; for he in himself is 
nothingness ; he is but a speck even amid rational creations. 
To his nothingness he has added rebellion, and in no way 
can he add an^'thing to God. Even on human principles 
his very service of God is almost insulting. He is the con- 
tradictory of God in all things, and if he is characterized 
by any one thing rather than another, it is by pusillanimity 
and meanness. We have therefore had to look for the reason 
on God's side ; and looking at His chief perfections, one 
after another, we have hardly found what we were seeking. 
Infinite justice would lead Him to punish us. Infinite sanc- 
tity would turn away from us in displeasure. Infinite beauty 
would be revolted, and infinite wisdom be disappointed. 
Infinite power would regard us as contemptible and pass 
us over. Infinite truthnvould contemplate us as an hypo- 
crisy and a lie. Finally, mercy all but infinite would tire 
of us, and it is just the infinity of mercy which does not 
tire. But love is something more than not being tired. 

Why then does God love us ? We must answer, Because 
He created us. This then would make mercy the reason 
of His love. But why did He create us ? Because He loved 
us. We are entangled in this circle, and do not see how to 
escape from it. Bat it is a fair prison. We can rest in it, 
while we are on earth ; and if we are never to know any- 
thing more, then we will make our home in it for eternity. 
Who would tire of such captivity ? 

God loves us because He has created us. What sort of a 
feeling is it which the peculiarity of having created some 
one out of nothing would give us ? Who can tell ? We 
suppose it to be a feeling which contains in itself all the 
grounds of all earthly loves, such as paternal, fraternal, 
conjugal, and filial; and of all angelic loves besides, of 
which we know nothing. We suppose it to contain them 
all, not only in an infinite degree, but also in the most in- 
12 



178 WHY GOD LOVES US. 

conceivably eminent manner, and further than that, with 
an adorable simplicity which belongs only to the Divine 
Nature. But when we have imagined all this, we see that 
something remains over and above in a Creator's love, which 
we cannot explain ; but which we must suppose to be a 
feeling arising out of His having created us out of nothing, 
and which is what it is, because He is what He is, the in- 
finitely blessed God. This then is our answer : He loves 
us because He has created us. Certainly the mvstery does 
not fill our minds with light ; at least not with such light 
as we can communicate ; but, which is far more it sets our 
hearts on fire. 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 179 



CHAPTER III. 

OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 

Magna res amor. Nam cum amat Deus, non aliud vult quam amari : 
quippe qui ob aliud non amat, nisi ut ametur, sciens ipsos amore beatos 
qui se amaverint. suavitatem ! O gratiam ! amoris vim ! 

,S'. Bernard. 

It has often been the benevolent amusement of sages and 
philanthropists to draw pictures of imaginary republics. 
Sometimes they have placed their ideal citizens in positions 
unusually favorable for the exercise of the highest virtues, 
at other times they have represented the whole duty and 
happiness of men to consist in some one virtue, as patriot- 
ism or simplicity, or again these legislators have delivered 
their imaginary people from all the restraints and conven- 
tions of civilization, in order that the development of their 
liberty might take its own direction and have the fullest 
play. So we also might amuse ourselves by conceiving 
some possible imaginary world. We might suppose that, 
when the day of doom is over, God^s creative love will move 
to some other planet of our system, and people it with 
rational creatures, to serve Him and to glorify His Name. 
We might picture to ourselves these creatures as neither 
angels nor men ; but of some different species, such as God 
knows how to fashion. They might preserve their original 
integrity, and neither fall partially, as the angels did, nor 
the whole race, as was the unhappy fortune of man. They 
would of course be the subjects of Jesus, because He is the 
head and first-born of all creatures. But their way of wor- 



180 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

shipping Him might be quite different from ours. They 
might also be under different material laws ; and different 
powers of mind and will might involve varieties of moral 
obligation very different from those which belong to us. 
They might thus be another variety in the magnificence of 
Christ^s church. They might be higher than angels, or 
lower than men, or between the two. They would be least 
likely to be lower than men, because then our Blessed Lord 
would not have carried His condescension to the uttermost. 
When we had fully pictured to ourselves this possible world, 
we might curiously descend into every conceivable ramifi- 
cation of that new planetary life, and see what the beha- 
vior of these creatures would be like. We might watch 
them in the arrangements of their social system, in the 
complications of their public life, or in the minute habits 
of their domestic privacy. We might picture to ourselves 
their trades and professions, their standards of the beauti- 
ful, their arts and sciences, their philosophy and literature, 
their rules of criticism, their measures of praise or blame. 
We might imagine war to be an impossibility to their na- 
ture, their political revolutions to be without sin, their suf- 
ferings not to be penalties of a past fault, or solitude to be 
to them the same sort of normal state which society is to 
us. When we had completed our picture, this possible 
world would have some kind of likeness to our own, al- 
though it would be so very different, partly because God 
would be its Creator, and partly because we could not 
paint the picture without copying in some degree from our- 
selves. 

This imaginary world would probably however differ less 
from ours, than ours would differ from itself, if the precept 
of the love of God were fully kept by all the inhabitants of 
the world. Let us try now to put a picture of this before 
ourselves. It need not be altogether imaginary, and it may 
actually help to realize itself. Every man and woman in 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 181 

the world, and every child as soon as it comes to the use 
of reason, is bound by the golden chains of that delightful 
precept. Christian or Jew, Mahometan or idolator, all 
souls, in all their degrees of darkness and of light, are 
under the bright shadow of that universal commandment. 
Nothing can be more reasonable. Every creature was 
created by God for God's own sake. Hence he has nothing 
to do but God's work, nothing to seek but God's glory ; 
and that work and that glory God has been pleased to 
repose in love, in the easy service of a rational and yet 
supernatural love. Neither has He left us in uncertainty 
with respect to the extent of the precept. Hear, Israel, 
the Lord our God is one Lord. Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, 
and with thy whole strength. St. Matthew tells us that a 
doctor of the law said to Jesus, Master, which is. the great 
commandment in the law? Jesus said to him. Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy 
whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest 
and the first commandment. Where Moses says, with thy 
whole strength, St. Matthew says, with thy whole mind. 
Thus God is solemnly declared to be the object of our love, 
which love is to be distinguished by two characteristics. 
It is to be universal : heart, soul, mind, and strength are 
to go to it. It is to be undivided: for it claims the 
whole heart, the whole soul, the whole mind, the whole 
strength. 

Putting it then at the lowest, and setting aside such 
heroic manifestations of love as are either the ornaments 
of a devout piety or the counsels of a high perfection, what 
is every one bound to by this precept, as soon as he attains 
the use of reason? He is bound to love God better than 
anything else : he is bound to put a higher value upon God 
than anything else : he is bound to obey all the will of God 
about him as far as he knows it: and he is bound, at least 

Q 



182 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

in general intention, to direct all his actions to the glory 
of God. In his heart nothing can be allowed to come into 
competition with God. His soul must be engrossed by 
nothing short of God. His mind must esteem nothing at 
all in comparison with God ; and all his strength must be 
at God's service in a way in which it is not at the service 
of anything else. Whatever he falls short of all this from 
the first day of reason's dawn to the closing hour of life, 
he must repair with a loving sorrow based on God's eternal 
goodness. This is of simple obligation to the whole world, 
through the populous breadth of Asia, in the crowded 
coasts and vast cities of Europe, across Africa from one 
ocean to the other, from the northernmost dwelling of 
America to where its extreme headlands face the antarctic 
ice, and in every island of the sea and palm-crowned coral 
reef, both great and smalL It is as much of obligation, more 
so if it could be more, as to do no murder. Not a creature 
of God ever has entered or ever will enter into His eternal 
joy, who has not kept this precept, or by sorroAv won his 
forgiveness for the breach, except the baptised infants of 
the catholic church. 

Many considerations may be more startling than this : 
but we know of none which are more profoundly serious. 
For we must bear in mind that we are speaking, not of 
counsel, but of commandment, not of perfection but of obli- 
gation, not of possibilities but of necessities. It is the 
very alphabet of our religion, the starting point of our 
catechism, the first principle of salvation ; and reapcn claims 
to join with revelation in imposing this universal precept 
on the souls of men. 

Does the world keep it ? Let us see what it would be 
like if it did keep it. We are to suppose that all the men, 
women, and children over seven, throughout the earth, 
loved God always, God supremely, and God with an undi- 
vided heart. The world might then be called a world of 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 183 

undivided hearts. It would be the peculiarity of this 
planet, of this portion of God's creation, of this fair moon- 
lit garden third in order from the sun: it would be its pe- 
culiarity that it was a living world of loving human hearts, 
over which God reigned supreme with an empire of undi- 
vided love. This, we must use human words, is what God 
intended, what God expected, the paradise and court He 
had prepared for His Incarnate Son. And if it were so 
would it be less unlike the real world than that imaginary 
possible world which we were picturing to ourselves just 
now? 

If all classes in their places, and all minds in their 
measure and degree, were loving God according to the 
precept, wonderful results would follow. To realize them 
we should have to penetrate into every corner of the world, 
into every secret sanctuary of life, and watch the revolution 
which divine love would bring about. No one thing would 
be the same. The world would not be like a world of 
saints, because we are not supposing heroic, austere, self- 
sacrificing love, but only the love of the common precept. 
Voluntary suffering is part of the idea of the Incarnation, 
or flows from it : for Christian austerity is a form of love, 
which has little in common with the proud expiating 
penance of the Hindoo, except the look. It would not be 
like an immense monastery : for all men would be in the 
world, not leaving the world ; and the world would be a 
means of loving God, not a hinderance which our courage 
must vanquish, or a snare from which our prudence is fain 
to fly. There would be no wickedness to make a hell on 
earth : yet earth could not be heaven, because there would 
be no vision of God. It would be more like purgatory than 
anything else. For the love of God would not hinder 
suffering, though it would almost abolish sorrow. But it 
would make all men pine very eagerly and very patiently 
to love God more, and to see Him whom they already love 



184 OUR MEANS or LOVING GOD. 

SO much. The whole earth would be one scene of religion, 
not of religious enthusiasm or the romance of sanctity, but 
of active, practical, exclusive, business-like religion. Com- 
mon sense would be engrossed with religious duties. Each 
man would be unimpassionately possessed with religion, 
as if it were his ruling passion, working powerfully under 
control. Yet all this would be within the bounds of the 
common precept, not like the sublime preternatural lives 
of the canonized saints. Remember — we are not speak- 
ing of what is possible, so much as of what is conceivable. 
What a change would come over the political world ! 
The love of God would be the honest and obvious and ex- 
clusive end of all states and nations. Diplomacy would 
fade away into mutual counsel for God's glory, and having 
lost all its mystery, it would lose all its falsehood too. 
Commercial treaties, questions of boundaries, the rights of 
intervention, — what a new character the love of God would 
infuse into as many of these things as it still allowed to 
live! The mercantile world, how calm and indifferent it 
would become I No one would make haste to be rich. 
Except food and raiment and ordinary comforts, we say 
comforts because, on the hypothesis, men would not be 
saints, all else of life would be prayer and praise and works 
of mercy, with confession perhaps for venial sins. The 
literature of these men would give forth nothing but what 
was chaste and true, ennobling and full of faith. A daily 
newspaper, such as we are acquainted with, would be a 
blissful impossibility. We fear that antiquarian questions 
might be pursued with somewhat less of zest than now, and 
possibly fewer sacrifices of life be made to advance the 
interests of science. A most vigorous reality would enter 
into and animate everything. Many professions would 
change their characters ; many more would cease to exist. 
Systems of education would be greatly modified ; and pri- 
sons and police would disappear from the land. Sessions 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 185 

of parliament would be very short, and little would be 
said, and very much be done. The tone of conversation 
would be changed, and a sort of strange tranquillity would 
come over the race of men, with which energy would not 
be necessarily incompatible, but under which our energy 
would be so different from what it is now, that we cannot 
at all adequately represent it to ourselves. 

But, in return for this apparent dulness, which might 
affect some of the things on which our activity at present 
fastens, by morbid predilection, how much the world would 
gain in other ways ! How magnificent would be the con» 
troversies of such a world ! The peace and light of the 
love of God would elevate the intellect a thousand-fold. 
The products of the human mind would be incalculably 
more profound and beautiful than now, and the amount of 
intellectual activity would be immeasurably increased, 
while a larger proportion of it also would be employed on 
the higher branches of mental philosophy. What eleva- 
tion, too, and gigantic progress, would the physical sciences 
probably receive, as well from the greater cultivation of 
mental philosophy, as from the reach and grasp of intelli- 
gence which more abundant grace would restore to us ! 
The sciences of beauty, too, how much more beautiful and 
abundant would they come, when they were called to 
minister to the sanctuary of God, and not to the mere 
material indulgences of men ! Who can believe we should 
not know much more of nature, and of its mysterious pro- 
perties, if we knew more of Him who originated them all, 
and love would teach us more of Him ? The amount of 
private happiness would be likewise augmented beyond all 
calculation. All other loves would be, as it were, glorified 
by the love of God; and would be poured out of each 
human heart with an intensity and an abundance to which 
sin is now a complete impediment. The moral perfections 
of our nature would bring forth exquisite and generous 

q2 



186 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

fruits, of which we have at present but rare instances, at 
distant intervals. But, above and beyond all this, there 
would be a world of supernatural actions, flowing in in- 
cessant streams from every heart, uniting us to God, puri- 
fying our commonest intentions, and transforming us, day 
by day, into an excellence far beyond ourselves. What 
must the precept be whose common observance would do 
so much as this ? And yet this precept actually lies upon 
each one of us at this moment, with the most inevitable 
universality and the most stringent obligation ! Surely we 
must see to this. 

Hitherto, we have been engaged in two very elementary 
inquiries ; Why does God wish us to love Him ? and, Why 
does He love us ? If God desires us to love Him, there 
must be some sort of love with which it is possible and 
right to love Him. This is obvious. Yet, in the course 
of our investigations, we have come across so much in 
ourselves that is little and vile and mean, that we may be 
tempted to think that we cannot love God with any real or 
acceptable love. It is just here that God meets our self- 
abjection, guards it from excess, and hinders its doing us 
any injury, by laying upon us the absolute and essential 
precept of loving Him with our whole heart and soul and 
mind and strength. He enables us to fulfil this command- 
ment, by disclosing to us a beautiful variety of grounds or 
motives for our love ; and He makes the fulfilment easy, by 
the many kinds of love of which he has made our souls 
capable, and which suit the difi'erent temperaments of men. 
So, what we have to do now, is to examine our grounds for 
loving God, and then the various kinds of love with which 
it is happily in our power to love our most merciful Crea- 
tor. 

We must observe, first of all, that the love which is 
required of us by the precept, is a personal love. None 
else will satisfy. It is not the love of the approbation of 



OUR IMEANS OF LOVING GOD. 187 

conscience, or of the self-re\Yarding sense of dut}^ or of the 
loveliness of virtue, or of the immensity of our recompense, 
or of the attraction which a well-ordered mind has to rec- 
titude and propriety. It is a personal love, and must be 
characterized by the warmth, the generosity, the intimacy, 
the dominion, and all the peculiar life which belongs to a 
personal love, as distinguished from the love of a thing or 
of a place. It is the love of a Being, of Three Divine 
Persons, of God. He reveals Himself to us in various 
affectionate relationships, so as to make our love more 
intensely personal, more like a loyalty and a devotion, 
and, at the same time, to adapt it better to our human 
nature. 

But when we return the love of another, it very much 
concerns us to know what kind and amount of love it is 
which we have to return. At the risk of repetition, we 
must, therefore, briefly sum up the love of God to man, as 
theology puts it before us. God's love of His creatures is 
not the fruit of His mercy, or of any of the Divine Perfec- 
tions by themselves. His love of us is part of His Natural 
Goodness ; and His natural goodness is simply the excel- 
lence of His Divine Nature, considered in itself. God's 
goodness, we are taught in the catholic schools, is threefold. 
He is good by reason of the perfection of His nature, and 
this is His natural goodness. He is good also by reason 
of His sanctity, and this is His moral goodness. He is 
good also by reason of His beneficence, which is called His 
benignity. But, in reality, this last goodness is simply a 
part of the first, a necessary consequence of the perfection 
of His Nature, of His natural goodness ; so that love of 
creatures, or the Divine benignity, is part of the perfection 
of the Divine Nature. How unspeakable, therefore, is the 
value of the love of God ! how transcending the dignity 
with which it invests the poor helpless creature ! and how 
completely does the origin of His love of us, deep down in 



188 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

the primal fountains of the Godhead, simplify Him, and 
all His condescensions, and His gifts, and His justice, and 
His anger, to pure and simple love ! 

Let us follow the teaching of theology a little further. 
The Divine Nature is a plenitude of perfection, a fulness 
and a " superfulness,'' as St. Denys calls it. Not that God 
is too full, or can ever cease being filled, but He is eternally 
filled to overflowing with the true, the beautiful, the mag- 
nificent, and the good. Fulness leads to communicative- 
ness. Communicativeness is the consequence of abundance. 
It is the necessity of an overflowing abundance. It seems 
a law even among creatures, a shadow of a higher law, 
that, in proportion as a thing is perfect, it is full of perfec- 
tion in its own kind, and longs to communicate itself, and 
at last breaks its bound and does communicate itself. This 
is the case with human love, human kindness, human know- 
ledge. Exuberance is an inseparable accompaniment of 
perfection. So this "superfulness^' of God, this exceeding 
plenitude of the Divine Nature, must needs communicate 
itself, and be eternally communicating itself. This com- 
munication may be of two kinds : the one natural or 
necessary, which must be and which must always be ; the 
other free, which God may withhold, which is a gift, which 
is not necessary, but which, when God has once been 
pleased to make it, cannot easily be separated from Him, 
even in idea. We can conceive that there could have been 
such a Being as an Uncreating God. But we cannot con- 
ceive what He would have been like. He would not have 
resembled our own present God. He would not have been 
our Heavenly Father, merely short of Benignity, Dominion, 
Providence, Mercy, Justice, and of that perfection which 
makes Him the End of all things. His natural goodness 
vvouid have been different, not less infinitely perfect, but 
inconceivably otherwise than it is now.^ 

* Lessius de Perfect Divin. lib. ix. Also St. Thomas i. q. xiii. art. 7. 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 189 

As the perfection of the Divine Nature is infinite, so the 
communication of it which is natural and necessary must 
be infinite as well ; and it must have this mysterious and 
adorable characteristic, that it must communicate itself 
vrithout multiplying itself; for how can that which is infi- 
nite be multiplied? Hence comes the fecundity of the 
Divine Nature, considering that Nature in Three Persons, 
the Father as the Fountain of the Godhead, the Son as the 
Eternal Knowledge of itself, and the Holy Ghost as its 
eternal Love of self, as one essence in Three Equal Divine 
Persons. From the communicativeness, or fecundity of the 
Divine Nature, it must necessarily be that the Father ever 
generates, the Son is ever generated, the Father and the 
Son ever breathe forth their love as one, and the Holy 
Spirit is ever being breathed forth. And because of the 
infinite plenitude of the Divine Nature there can, in this 
necessary and natural communication of itself, be no sort 
of inequality, no precedence, no priority, no diminution, 
no inferiority, no subordination.^ These are not mere 
words. They are God's eternal life. They will be our 
eternal life as well. 

Besides this necessary communication of the Divine Na- 
ture, which is natural to it, and inevitable, there is also a 
free communication of it, an overflow which is a gift, a 
magnificence deeply appertaining to God's natural good- 
ness, and yet which He could withhold, and still be God. 
As we call the necessary communication of the Divine Na- 
ture its fecundity, so we call the free communication of it, 
its benignity, both being in fact consequences of God's na- 
tural goodness, only the one necessary, the other free. 
There is no limit to the number of ways in which the Di- 
vine Nature may freely communicate itself; and each of 

* The reader must distinguish between the Divine Essence communicating 
itself, and the Divine Essence generating itsel^, which last is forbidden by 
the Lateran Council to be said. 



190 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

these ways will represent a difi'erent and peculiar rational 
creation. We only know of two such ways, which have 
resulted, one in the creation of angels, the other in the 
creation of men. But there might be as many divers 
rational creations as there are millions of starry worlds, or 
all the stars multiplied a million times. We cannot venture 
to suppose that the creations of angels and men have ex- 
hausted the possible modes by which the Divine Nature 
may freely communicate itself to created intellects and to 
created wills. Creation, if we may say so, is perhaps only 
in its infancy ; and as God seems to have an inconceivable 
love of order, and He, to whom there is no succession, ap- 
pears to delight in doing things successively in realms of 
time and space, so, when the doom has closed the probation 
of the family of man, other creatures may succeed, other 
natures people material worlds, or immaterial homes of 
spiritual beauty ; and so God may go on in His fertile 
benignity for evermore. I cannot look at the starry skies, 
but this thought comes to my mind like a belief. There 
may be rational creatures lower than man, though it cer- 
tainly is very difficult to conceive of them. But even our 
limited capacities can imagine a perpetual efflux of rational 
creations higher than man in almost numberless degrees. 
Thus creation is God doing freely, what in the Generation 
of the Son and the Procession of the Holy Ghost He does 
necessarily. The natural goodness of God, which is defined 
to be the excellence of the Divine Nature, is the single ex- 
planation of all His operations, whether within Himself or 
without. So that the same love which evermore *' produces'^ 
in God, as theologians speak, the Holy Trinity, made of its 
own free will both men and angels, and cherishes them with 
an eternal compassion. What a view of creation does not 
this open out before us ! How is it we can ever think of 
anything but God ? how more than royal is the origin 
of our immortal souls, and in what vast destinies does 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 191 

Divine love intend that they should expatiate for evermore ! 
Earth grows more and more like a speck as our thoughts 
ascend : our affections detach themselves from it more and 
more. As life goes on, and life and grace together draw us 
nearer to God, earth, in spite of all its affectionate memo- 
rials, becomes only a pretty planet, and nothing more : but 
oh ! why is it we let slow time do the work which swift 
grace would so much better do? 

But this account of God's love of creatures does by no 
means include all that is to be said of His love of man. 
The creation of angels is incomparably more magnificent 
than the creation of men. Men are all of one species. 
The diversities of the angels are no doubt specific. Some 
have thought that as angels do not produce each other, like 
the fruitful generations of men, each angel must be a 
species himself. Others consider, for reasons this is not the 
place to enter into, that each choir consists of three species, 
which in the nine choirs of the three hierarchies would 
make twenty-seven species. None would doubt but that 
the hierarchies and even the choirs must differ from each 
other specifically. Nay, to us we confess it seems un- 
likely that earth with its infinite variety of beasts and 
birds, of insects and fishes, should outdo in this peculiar 
kind of magnificence, namely, the numberlessness of species, 
the great angelic world ; and if the specific differences of 
the angels are more simple than those of earth, they would 
be all the more striking because of their simplicity. Yet 
in spite of the superiority of the angelic world, and because 
perhaps we are less acquainted with its peculiar preroga- 
tives, men seem to have many indubitable pre-eminences 
above the angels. The angels imitate the virginity of the 
Most Holy Trinity without its fruitfulness. Man shares 
in the fruitfulness of God ; and Mary, a pure daughter of 
man and whose nature is merely human, shares at once 
the fruitfulness and the virginity of God, and, as His Mother, 



192 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

rules the angels with queenly supremacy in heaven. This 
pretty planet was the scene of the Incarnation and the 
Crucifixion of the Son of God. He took man^s nature upon 
Him, not that of angels. He had a human Mother, a 
human Soul, a human Body. He spoke human language, 
and had human thoughts. He had human ways about Him, 
human habits, gestures, peculiarities, and even infirmities. 
Furthermore, when the angels fell, He held out no hand to 
check them as they went down the frightful abyss. Man 
He forgives not once, or twice, or seventy times seven 
times, but many times a day, and all day long. He stands 
in a different relation to man, and man to Him. His love 
of man comes out of the same natural goodness, which 
gives forth His love of the angels. But His love of us is a 
different sort of love. His love of us seems to contain more 
than His love of them. At least it has certain peculiarities 
proper to itself, a fondness, a clinging to us, a patience 
with us, a pursuit of us, an attraction to us, which the par- 
don of the Fall and the mystery of the Incarnation do 
nothing but exemplify. Whence this predilection for the 
human race ? Whence this preference on the part of the 
Divine Nature of human nature over the angelic? Is it 
because we are so little and so low? Is it because the 
Divine Nature in yearning to communicate itself, yearned 
to do ^0 to the uttermost, was not content short of the 
lowest point of the rational creation, and that the depth of 
its abasement was the measure of its gladness and its love ? 
If so, new creations will be higher than man, not lower : 
lower than the angels, God^s eldest born, but higher than 
that lowest step in the scale of intellectual creations, whereon 
the Incarnate Word has taken His stand that He may em- 
brace all creations beneath His Headship, and cement all 
of them together, the highest with the lowest, as one 
dominion pertaining to the Unity of God. 

Such is the only picture that we, after trial, have been 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 193 

able theologically to make to ourselves of the love of God 
for man. It is this enormous love \vhich it is our duty to 
return. It is not a matter of choice, or of perfection. It is 
a question of precept and obligation. It is a command- 
ment, vrhich we shall be lost eternally if we do not endea- 
vor to fulfil. Our next step, therefore, must be to enquire 
upon what feelings of our human nature God has engrafted 
the possibility of our loving Him, in what channels He has 
bidden that love to run, what motives are to actuate it, on 
what relationships to Ilim it is to establish itself. For it 
will be found that God is so essentially good that whatever 
position He takes up with regard to us is a new right and 
title to our love. We do not say that those who are lost 
will love Him, but even in their case His mercy has a right 
to love, both because punishment was so long delayed, and 
because it is now inflicted with so much less severity than 
they have both merited and could be supernaturally 
strengthened to endure. But in our case, whose account is 
mercifully not yet closed, it is simply true that every rela- 
tion in which God stands to us furnishes us with new and 
constraining motives to love Him with a fresh and daily 
beginning love. 

First of all, we are God^s subjects. There are none of us 
who desire to question His dominion. "We should be sim- 
ply ruined, annihilated, if we were not in His care and 
keeping. Obedience to Him is safer and happier for us 
than any liberty of which we could dream. He is our king, 
and never monarch had so many claims to enthusiastic 
popularity as He. His rule over us is the gentlest we can 
conceive. It hardly makes itself felt at all. His omnipre- 
sence is like the pressure of the air, needful to health and 
life, yet imperceptible. His government is one of love. 
His very penalties we have to wring from Him by repeated 
treasons, and when they come they are so disguised in 
mercy, that it is hard to discern between chastisement and 
13 R 



194 OUR MEANS OP LOVING GOD. 

love. His facility in pardoning is something beyond com- 
pare. He seems to compromise His own regal dignity by 
the profuse liberality with which He uses His prerogative 
of mercy. He pardons not only after the nervousness of 
trial and the ignominy of conviction, but He pardons us 
without mentioning it, without boasting of it, without 
warning us, without getting the credit of pardoning, often 
as in baptism, and with forgotten sins, without even our 
acknowledgment of guilt. Often He seems to forgive be- 
fore the offence is complete. We sin, half knowing we shall 
be forgiven. As to the consequences of our sins to others, 
He hardly ever lays on us the responsibility of attending 
to them. He charges His own administration with that 
burden, which of a truth requires a love, a wisdom, and a 
power which He alone possesses. No earthly king was ever 
like Him in His providence over His subjects. No angelic 
monarch could come near Him in this beautiful perfection. 
Every want is foreseen. The vast complications both of 
nature and of grace fit close to the individual life, shield 
it from every danger, penetrate it with a balm and sweet- 
ness which give vigor and delight, and make each man 
feel as if the world were made for him alone, and as if he 
were rather the last end of God than God the last end to 
him. In the exercise of His royalty, all is equable, timely, 
harmonious, pliant ; nothing harsh, sudden, abrupt, dis- 
concerting, or domineering. Surely then, simply as Hia 
subjects, we are bound to a loyalty and love as warm, 
and generous, and faithful, as it is easy, ennobling and de- 
lightful. 

But we are His servants also. He is our master as well 
as our king. All servitude is full of motives of humility. 
Servants, when they forget that they are servants, cease that 
moment to be good servants. Yet, if we thought and felt 
aright, presumption would be more likely than abjection to 
grow upon the thought that we are in the service of our Ma- 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 195 

ker. The annals of history give us many beautiful examples 
of the attachment which a noble-minded servant can have 
for his earthly master; and the memorials of private life are 
full of them all the year round. But what is it which makes 
a master so justly dear to a good servant? It is his consi- 
derateness. And who is so considerate as God ? Oh won- 
derful mystery ! see how God always shows by His manner 
to us His remembrance of our little services, a forgetfalness 
of our slovenly shortcomings, an affectionate exaggerated 
satisfaction with what we do, and at the worst a look only 
of wondering wounded feeling, when disgrace, reproof, or 
chastisement would better have fitted our misdeeds ! He 
never lets us be oppressed with work. He never disregards 
our fatigue. He cheers us under failure. It is, if we must 
say it, almost the fault of His easy kindness that we are 
apt to forget ourselves, to play the master, and to wonder 
when He does not wait on us and serve, though of a truth 
He seldom fails to change places with us when we want it. 
His forbearance is one incessant miracle. We should not 
keep a servant a month who treated us as we treat Him. 
Awkward, ungracious, reluctant, it is thus we always meet 
the courtesies of His abundant love, which vouchsafes to 
treat us on equal terms, lest even the look of condescension 
should wound the silly susceptibilities of our childish 
pride. As to wages, both those He has bound Himself to 
give, and those which come in the shape of frequent gifts, 
and perquisites unspecified, the bounty of an earthly master 
is to His munificence as the poverty of the creature is to 
the wealth of the Creator. Who would not rather be the 
servant of such a Master, than have a whole world left to 
himself and to the liberty of his disposal? Who would 
care to have creation for his property, when he may have 
the Creator for his own ? 

God is our Friend. It requires an act of faith, and not 
a little act, to say so. But so it is ; the Infinite, the Omni- 



196 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

potent, the All-holy is our bosom friend. We doubt if any 
human friendship ever really lasted the whole of two 
mutual lives. Few men are habitually insincere even with 
the few whom they love extremely. Fewer still trust their 
friends with a perfectly confiding trust. Nay, friend- 
ship shows itself in a morbid readiness to take offence, in 
petty diplomacies to find out if injurious suspicions are 
true, in proud silences which will not ask for explanations, 
or in childish breaches made for the childish excitement of 
reconciliations. The truth is, friendship is a romance, that 
has been written and spoken a thousand times among men, 
but never acted, unless in a dramatic way. Thus we pray 
proverbially to be saved from our friends, and we say that 
a man who has many acquaintances, and few friends, is at 
once the happiest and the safest of mankind. There have 
hardly been a dozen friendships since the time of Jonathan 
and David, which could bear the weight of an awkward- 
looking circumstance, or a decently attested report And 
friendship at its height, in the fervor of its fever-fit, what 
is it but a tyranny ? Our friends think themselves gods, 
not men, and us their instruments, the profitable imple- 
ments of their pleasure, their ambition, and their will. 
Friendship is not consecrated by a sacrament as marriage 
is. Yet we must have a friend. We shrink from unbe- 
friended solitude. But there is no real friend but God. 
He is in His own world almost the solitary example of the 
beauty of fidelity. See what a friend He is ! He acts as 
if He thinks better of us than we think even of ourselves. 
He can suspect nothing; for He is God. He forgives 
offences as fast as we commit them, and appears to forget 
as soon as He has forgiven. His love is always as fresh to 
us as it was at the beginning. And He keeps plighting 
His friendship with us by presents, whose exuberant 
variety never tires, while their magnificence and exceeding 
price outstrip the fondest expectation, and the grace 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 197 

with which they are conferred removes from the sense 
of obligation all the feeling of oppression, and conduces 
rather to the equal familiarity of love. Whenever we 
will we can be friends with God, and He gives Himself 
up to His friends with such a romantic exclusiveness, 
that we feel as if He belonged to us alone, and that all of 
Him was ours. 

God is our Father also, and we are the children of His 
predilection. Truants and prodigals, no longer worthy to 
be called His sons, and yet still His heirs, still the objects 
of His most lavish paternal tenderness. Did ever mother 
yearn over the cradle of her first-born, as He has yearned 
over us? Did ever father make his children's sorrows 
more his own than God has done, or yet leave to them so 
generously untaxed, and untythed, the treasures that were 
theirs ? Did ever parental love remain true love, and yet 
punish so infrequently as He, or when it punished, did it 
with so light a hand or with a sorrow more reluctant? 
Can Divine Love quite exculpate itself from the charge of 
having spoiled us by its indulgence ? Did ever father so 
consistently or with such grave affection win his children 
to repentance by the sorrow that He showed and by the 
increased kindness of his manner, as God has melted our 
hard hearts and drawn us, humbled yet doubly loving, to 
His knees for pardon ? Does not each chastisement seem 
worth far more than the pain it gives, by the increase of 
love and the new inventions of His favour with which He 
follows it? who is such a Father as God is! The 
Eternal Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
Father of His creatures, the Father from whom all father- 
hood is named in heaven and on earth ! When we think 
of Him we forget the love of our earthly fathers ; for they 
hardly look like fathers by the side of Him. 

He is our Creator also, and we are His creatures, the 
least and lowest of those who can glorify Him with a rea- 

r2 



198 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

sonable worship, and yet whom He has loved above the 
angels, and chosen to be nigher to Himself. Here we 
have no earthly term of comparison whereby to judge of 
His surpassing love. He has chosen us ; and choice is the 
highest act of love. He chose us when as yet we lay in 
the bosom of the great void, distinguishable only to the 
piercing eye of His preference and love. He chose us 
rather than others. He had a special love for something 
we by grace might be, and which others could not be or 
would not be. It was His first choice of us. It was 
eternal. Our likeness lived in the Divine Mind from ever- 
lasting, and was cherished there with infinite complacency. 
He prepared a fortune for us, marked out a life, measured 
our sorrows to us with wise love, and tempered our joys so 
that they might not be an injury. He gave us a work, 
clothed us with a vocation, and destined for us a particular 
crown and place in heaven. We cannot name the thing 
which is bright and good within us, nor the thing which is 
attractive and delectable without us, but it comes from our 
creation. We have to do with it, as being the creatures of 
the infinitely benignant God. All we are or have is His, 
together with all we are capable of being and having. 
That we are not imprisoned in perdition at this moment is 
simply an interference of His goodness. Our creation is 
our share of the infinite goodness of God. What should 
we be without it ? Can any love of ours be otherwise than 
a poor return for such a love as His ? 

But we are not only God^s creatures ; we are His elect 
as well. He made as it were a second choice of us in 
Jesus Christ. He foresaw our fall. He beheld not only 
what Adam's fall entailed upon us, but He saw our own 
actual sins and guilt. He did not exaggerate our shame, 
but He knew it as not all men and angels together could 
have known it. He penetrated its unbearable corruption. 
He laid its loathsomeness all bare before His eye. It 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 199 

was incredible. Such graces slighted, such inspirations 
neglected, such sacraments profaned, and with a perversity, 
a frequency, an ingenuity of aggravating circumstances, so 
great that perhaps, if we saw the hideous vision all in 
one, we should fall back and die. Nevertheless it was not 
enough to repel His electing love. He chose us to be 
bathed in the Precious Blood of His Incarnate Son. He 
elected us to a magnificent inheritance of grace, and to the 
royalties of His Holy Church. By virtue of this election 
He gave us the gift of faith, and threw open to us the 
golden gates of the overflowing and joyous sacraments. 
By His first election He chose us out of nothing to have 
life : by His second, out of darkness to have light. Here 
again His benignity outstrips all the comparisons of earthly 
love. When we think who it is that elected us, who we 
are that He elected, what He gives us through this election, 
the way in which He gives it, and the end for which He 
has elected us, we shall acknowledge that His election of 
us is a tie to be repaid, and even then what payment is it ? 
with all the fervor and fidelity of lifelong love. For where- 
fore was it that He chose us ? He chose us in Christ before 
the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and 
unspotted in His sight, in love ! 

Can more be said ? Yes ! there is still another tie which 
binds us fast to God. It is the end of what creation was 
the beginning; it is the consummation of God's eternal 
choice. It is the marriage of our souls with Him. We are 
His spouses, as well as His creatures and His elect. In- 
deed we are His spouses, because we are His creatures and 
His elect. But how cao we tell wherein the peculiarity of 
that, intimate union consists ? When the saints are be- 
trothed to God, it is by operations of grace so magnificent, 
by supernatural mysteries so transcendent, that the lan- 
guage in which they are related seems unreal and inflated ; 
and if such be the espousals on earth, what will the mar- 



200 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

riage be in heaven ? 1 who shall dare to picture the in- 
terior caresses which the soul receives from Him who loved 
it eternally, and chose it out of nothing in a rapture of 
creative love ? Who shall dare to fasten in ungainly hu- 
man words the sort of inexpressible equality with God 
which the soul enjoys, or her unspeakable community of 
goods with Him ? And wherefore does He use the word 
spouse, but to express this glorious unity ? Marriage was 
made a figure of the unity of God, and a shadow of Christ's 
union with His Church. Its love was to supersede all other 
ties. It was to obliterate the father's and the mother's 
home from the young wife's heart. It was to ride con- 
queror over the fond mother's idolatry for her first-born. 
Yet all this is the faintest of shadows, the feeblest of 
figures, to set forth the union of the soul with God ! How 
shall we love Him as we ought? Rather the question 
should be, Can we love Him at all with anything worthy 
of the name of love ? May we even try to love Him who 
has loved us with such an overwhelming love ? Must not 
our only love be speechless fear ? No ! for it is the law of 
all creation, the beautiful, benignant law, the unexpected, 
the incredible commandment, — Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with thy whole soul, with thy whole heart, with 
thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength ! 

Man's imagination can fly far, and picture the wildest 
pictures to itself. But now let it loose to ride upon the 
winds of heaven, to search the heights and the depths, to 
dream the most marvellous dreams, and to conceive the 
most impossible combinations. Can it picture to itself, can 
it, however dimly and remotely, divine a greater, a more 
wonderful, a more various, a more perfect love, consistent 
with the liberty of the creature, than the love which God 
has shown and is daily showing to the sons of men? Short 
of His laying violent hands upon our freedom, and carry- 
ing us off to heaven by force, and then doing fresh vio- 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 201 

lence to our nature, and making it endure and rejoice in the 
Vision of God, which without holiness would be intolerable 
to us, — short of this, which would be power rather than 
love, can we imagine any salvation more complete or more 
abundant than that with which God has rescued man ? 
Count up all that God has done for yourself. There is 
your eternal predestination, and the creative love which 
called you out of nothing ; there is your rational and im- 
mortal soul, with its beautiful dower of gifts ; there is 
your marvellous body, with its senses, which is one day to 
be transformed intx) surpassing loveliness, while every sense 
with its glorified capacities w^ill pour into the soul such 
floods of thrilling and exquisite delights, as it will require 
the strength of immortality to bear; there is the whole 
material world, made for your intellectual or physical 
enjoyment or support, so vast and glorious, that a little 
knowledge of one of its least departments, its minerals, for 
example, or its plants, makes a man famous among his 
fellows ; there is the guardianship of bright and holy 
angels ; there is your election in Christ, by which you now 
enjoy the faith and sacraments ; there is the giving up by 
God of His only Son, to take your nature upon Him, to 
suffer and to die, to redeem you from your sins ; there is 
the gift of His Precious Blood and of His renewed forgive- 
ness, conferred upon you ten thousand times ten thousand 
times, since you were seven years old, nay, from the very 
first hour of your regeneration ; there is His preservation 
of you, which is simply the unbroken continuity of your 
creation, requiring, every moment of day and night, of time 
and of an eternity to follow, as much influx from the Most 
High, as was needed to call your soul out of nothing at the 
first ; there are all the special helps, the wisely adapted 
graces, and the fresh arrangements of divine tenderness, 
which are waiting, ready for the hour when you shall come 
to die ; there is the indwelling of the Third Person of the 



202 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

Holy Trinity by grace within your soul; and, finally, there 
is your immeasurable reward, which is no gift of God, no 
immense collection of created pleasures, no multiplication 
by millions of the highest human and angelic joys, but 
God, the living God Himself. So that, strictly speaking, as 
a theologian says, it is not simply God who is the end of 
man, but God possessed, God by an ineffable communica- 
tion of Himself become our own, our property, and our 
enjoyment. 

In this catalogue of the demonstrations of love, there are 
many things so great and so utterly divine, that the unas- 
sisted intelligence of the highest angel would never have 
suspected them. Yet, when once the Incarnation was re- 
vealed, many imaginations might have been based thereon. 
AYe do not know if we could have ventured to dream of an 
Incarnation in humility and shame, in poverty and hidden- 
ness, unless we had been told it. But if our dearest Lord 
had lived on earth His three-and-thirty years, and then 
gone away, we think we might have conceived some pos- 
sible extensions of His love. We might have thought it 
would have been an additional tenderness if He had re- 
mained on earth personally until the day of judgment, that 
we might minister to Him, and share the privileges of Mary 
and Joseph, the apostles and the devout women in Judea, 
and have Him near us sensibly, and thus worship Him, as 
it were, at His own feet. But could we ever have dreamed 
of the superabundant way in which He has effected this, 
by the astounding mystery of the Blessed Sacrament? 

We might also have conceived that it would be a great con- 
solation to have Him still on earth that we might ask Him 
for dispensations when we needed them, that we might 
have intricate cases of conscience solved by His unquestion- 
able authority, that we might have formal permission from 
Him to carry out our favorite schemes for His greater 
glory, that we might receive absolution from our must 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 203 

heinous sins, that \Ye might ask Him what difficult passages 
in Scripture meant, and that we might hear from His in- 
fallible lips the truth or falsehood of uncertain doctrines. 
All this would have been an immense consolation to us, as 
it were a fresh dispensation of His love growing out of the 
exuberant mystery of the Incarnation. But it is just this, 
which He has provided for us in the Papacy. He has 
given, out of His dominion, the plentitude of His valid 
jurisdiction to the Holy Father, that we might have it in 
our necessities, dispensed with a wisdom which He guides, 
with a liberality like His own, and a valid jurisdiction no 
whit inferior to His, because it is in fact His own. These 
two congenial mysteries of the Blessed Sacrament and the 
Papacy seem to extend the lovingness of the Incarnation, 
as far as our imaginations can conceive. 

But there is a negative which is almost as inconceivable, 
a consequence which we should have expected to follow 
from the Incarnation, which has not followed. Surely, if, 
when the Incarnation had been first told us, with all its 
prodigal tenderness, its unnecessary sufferings, its fierce 
deluge of intolerable ignominies, the various atrocity of its 
pains, the pleading eloquence of its spendthrift blood- 
shedding, we had measured its length and breadth, its 
height and depth, to the best of our ability, we should 
have expected that henceforth, under the Christian law, 
perfection would be an obligation, that a precept would 
have been laid upon us all to love like the saints, and to live 
lives like theirs. It would not have seemed at all a stretch 
of jurisdiction, if our Lord had commanded very long 
fasts, frequent self-flagellations, voluntary austerities, 
sleeping on the ground, or painful vigils. We could 
neither have been surprised nor discontented, if, in return 
for what He had done for us, and in likeness and honor of 
His suffering life. He had forbidden under pain of mortal 
sin all or most of the amusements and recreations of the 



204 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

world. But we think it is most surprising, in fact it would 
be incredible to us if the faith did not assure us of it, that 
the Incarnation and Crucifixion have not added one jot or 
tittle to the original precept of the love of God, that they 
have actually diminished instead of multiplied our obliga- 
tions, that the more incalculably beyond our power of re- 
payment divine love has become, it should in fact be easier 
to repay it, and that less on our parts will save us, now 
that so much more has been done on His part for our sal- 
vation. We are never weary of wondering at this result 
of the Incarnation, which is to us at once so unexpected, 
and at the same time so full of overwhelming love. 

The conclusion we draw is this. Theology, with all its 
numberless and marvellous deductions, enables us to 
imagine possible things with an almost unlimited power of 
imagination. Now we have combined all the extremes we 
could, and conceived the most impossible conjectures ; and 
we cannot, do what we will, leave man his liberty, and 
conceive one additional instance of His love which God 
could give to the human race. We cannot heighten or 
embellish what is actual, nor can we dream of anything 
possible to add. The love of God for man exhausts the pos- 
sibilities of our imagination. Did God mean more than 
this, did He mean that it had exhausted the possibilities 
of His wisdom and His power, when He says so patheti- 
cally in Isaias, ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, and ye men 
of Juda, judge between Me and My vineyard. What is 
there that I ought to do more to My vineyard, that I have 
not done to it? 

It is this love outstripping all imagination, which we have 
to return : and how ? There are doubtless numberless ways 
in which God can communicate Himself to created intel- 
lects and wills, and each way will produce a different ra- 
tional creation, and each rational creation be capable of 
loving God in a great variety of ways. Thus among the 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 205 

angels there may be thousands of different loves of God, for 
which we have neither name nor idea ; and all of them are 
doubtless extremely beautiful, and highly spiritual. We 
are so entangled with matter and material ties that our love 
is debased in kind, as well as kept down in degree. Whereas 
the angels, having no connection with matter during their 
probation, doubtless loved God in their lowest degree with 
a purity and a fixity of contemplation which the highest 
saints hardly attain amongst ourselves ; though the merits 
of many saints may have exceeded those of many angels. 
Leaving then the capacious spirits of angels as an unknown 
land, we come to the souls of men ; and as far as we can 
divide one sort of love from another, where in reality each 
more or less involves the other, it seems we can love God 
with seven different kinds of love, the loves, namely, of 
benevolence, of complacence, of preference, of condolence, 
of gratitude, of desire, and of simple adoration. These are 
as it were so many capabilities of the human soul ; and if 
the fulfilment of the precept of love is what concerns us 
most, both in this world and in the world to come, the 
knowledge of these seven varieties of love must be of the 
greatest importance to our happiness. 

The love of benevolence is one which has been commonly 
practised by the saints, and often has seemed childish, or 
at best mere poetry, to those who love God less fervently. 
There is a strange pleasure in it, from our putting our- 
selves in an impossible position towards God, in order to 
confer it on Him. We make ourselves as it were His bene- 
fiictors, instead of His being ours. We put ourselves on an 
equality with Him, or even above Him. So it seems. Yet 
in reality this love of benevolence is the fruit of a holy 
humility too deep for words, almost too deep for tears. By 
the love of benevolence we, first of all, wish God to be more 
perfect, if it were possible, than He really is. Yet what a 
wild impossibility! But if God's love of His creatures is 

s 



206 OUR MEANS or LOVING GOD. 

itself SO exaggerated, He must let us love Him with the 
simplicity of these fervid exaggerations. Moreover this 
habit of wishing God impossible perfections is not only the 
result of a more worthy and true appreciation of His per- 
fection and His majesty, but it tends also to produce it, to 
sustain it, and to increase it. It is at once the cause and 
the effect of honorable thoughts of God. Another while 
the love of benevolence takes the form of venturesome con- 
gratulations. We wish God all the immense joy of His un- 
imaginable perfections. We know that He possesses it 
without our wishing it. We know that our wishes cannot 
swell by one drop the mighty sea of His interior jubilation. 
But it is an expression of our love, not in words only but 
in inward sentiment, which in His sight is an act, and a 
meritorious act. We bid Him rejoice. We wish Him 
countless happy returns of that eternal festival, which He 
has in His own blissful self. Or, another while, by the 
same love of benevolence, we wish Him all increase of His 
accidental glory ; and our wish is efficacious prayer, and 
obtains for Him a real augmentation of that particular 
glory. The very wish of itself adds to it, and adds im- 
mensely when it comes out of a pure heart and a fervent 
spirit. It also obtains grace for others, and makes the 
cause of God to prosper in the world. Sometimes we 
earnestly desire that He may have accidental glory which 
He does not receive. We wish that purgatory were emptied 
into heaven, or that there were no hell, or that all the hea- 
then were converted, or that all wanderers might return to 
the fold, or that some one day or night there might be no 
mortal sin in all our huge metropolis. All this, which the 
saints have reduced to as many practices as there have been 
saints to practise it, is the love of benevolence. 

The love of complacence is of a different disposition. It 
is content with God. It not only wants nothing more, but 
it only wants Him as He is. It is adapted to different 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 207 

moods of mind, suits other characters, or meets the change- 
ful dispositions of the soul, which now needs one class of 
sentiments, and now another. Complacence fixes its eye 
upon Avhat it knows of God with intense delight and with 
intense tranquillity. It rejoices that lie is what He is. It 
tells Him so. It tells it Him over and over again. Whole 
hours of prayer pass, and it has done nothing else but tell 
Him this. sublime childishness of love I most dear 
repetition, how far unlike the vain repetitions of the hea- 
then, which our Lord reproved ! Then it broods over its 
own joy. It slumbers over its own heart, a sweet and mys- 
tical repose, and wakes to renew its oft-told tale. Then a 
change comes over its spirit. A new strain of music steals 
out from its inmost soul. It rejoices that none else is like 
to God. It rejoices with Him in His unity, one of His own 
deepest and most secret joys. It exults that none can come 
near it. It asks all the hierarchies of creation with a boast- 
ful certainty, vaunting in its triumph, Who is like unto the 
Lord our God ? There is none other God but He. But its 
eloquence has so touched its own heart, that it becomes 
silent once again. It leans on God, and at last seems lost 
in Him, absorbed in quiet gladness and a rapture of holy 
thought. Thence once more it wakes, and seeing there is 
none like unto God, simply because He is God, and for no 
other cause, it bursts forth into passionate rejoicings, that 
He is not only what He is, but always has been, always will 
be what He is, that He is of a truth, and shall be, and must 
be, and alone can be, eternally and victoriously God. These 
are the delightful occupations of complacent love. 

The love of preference, or of esteem, hardly aims so 
high. It is more mixed up with thoughts of creatures. But 
it thinks of them only to despise them, and to insult them 
with its intelligent contempt. It compares God with all 
other things, as if it had tried them, convicted them of 
falsehood, and grown weary of their vanity. It tramples 



208 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

them under foot, and makes steps of their ruins whereby 
it may rise to God. Their nothingness grows upon it. It 
becomes disabused. Earthly ties no longer hold it down 
from heaven. Detachment is its characteristic grace. It 
passes unresistingly over the world, as a swallow skims 
the green meadow, and seems to have no need of resting. 
Hence it comes to appreciate God rightly, because it ap- 
preciates Him incomparably above all other things. It 
began by terms of comparison, and ends by seeing that no- 
thing can compare with Him, and that all comparison is 
foolish, because He is infinite, eternal, and all-holy. It 
gives God His right place in the world, which the multi- 
tude of men do not give Him. What is practical religion 
but giving God His right place in the heart and in our life ? 
The misery of the world is that God's rights are disallowed. 
This it is which makes it such a desolate and weary land. 
It is the confusion of the world which tires a loving heart 
and a quiet spirit. It is all a kind of base anarchy. Words 
and things not passing current for their right values and 
their true acceptations; importance attaching to the wrong 
things ; darkness unaccountably held to be light ; every- 
thing just sufficiently out of its right place to make a 
tumult all around it, and yet so nearly right that we chafe 
because we cannot right it: — it is all this which the love 
of preference remedies, by esteeming God, not as He de- 
serves to be esteemed in Himself, but as He deserves to be 
esteemed in competition with creatures. This love ex- 
presses itself by the energetic abundance of its good works, 
by its active zeal, by a mos.t intense hatred of sin, by a 
neglect of comforts, by sacrifice, and by austerity. These 
are its natural vents, and they at once depict its character. 
It is a love which, while it worships all the attributes of 
God, delights above all things to extol His sovereignty. 

The love of condolence difi'ers widely again from this. It 
looks upon God as wronged, and outraged, and in sorrow, as 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 209 

if He needed help, and were asking for an ally. Its ten- 
dency is to wed His interests, and to become strangely sus- 
ceptible about His honor. Its eyes are opened to see what 
common men cannot see. It beholds God concerned and im- 
plicated, where others cannot perceive so much as a vestige 
of religion being in question. It sees God everywhere, as 
if His omnipresence had been made visible to it, like the 
whiteness of the light or the blueness of the sky. It is a 
jealous love, and considerately inconsiderate, so that men 
are apt to take umbrage at it. It is very discreet, but not 
with a discretion which the world approves. Its discre- 
tion leads it to keep awake itself, and to awaken others, 
lest God should pass by unseen, and men should not un- 
cover as He passed. It mingles its own cause with God^s, 
and speaks of the two in the same breath and in the same 
way, as David does in the Psalms. It seeks God rather 
than looks at Him, and follows Him, delighted with the 
humblest servitudes. It has one life-long grief, like Mary's 
dolors ; and that grief is in the abundance and effron- 
tery of sin. Sin is a sharp pain to it. It does not make 
it angry, but it makes it weep. Its heart sickens with 
the goings on of men, and it tries to shroud God in the 
light of its own affectionate compassion. It has no anger 
with sinners. On the contrary it has quite a devotion to 
them. Our Lord's passionate, piteous, complaining love 
of sinners, as it is depicted in the divine Dialogue of S. 
Catherine of Siena, is the food of its soul. The Sacred Heart 
is the object of its predilection. It is ever telling God 
how sorry it is for sin. It has a grand gift of abiding con- 
trition for its own sins, and takes a holy pleasure in self- 
revenge. It lends God its eyes to weep rivers day and 
night for sins that are not its own. The seven dolors of 
Mary are as seven lives of sweet sorrow w^hich by grace it 
may lead, to soothe God for the transgressions of His chil- 
dren. The gift of piety, that peculiar gift of the Holy 
14 ^ s2 



210 OUR MEANS or LOVING GOD. 

Ghost, moulds its spiritual life, and its attitude towards 
God is eminently filial. The atmosphere of its heart is a 
spirit of reparation ; and it lets its life, secretly yet usefully 
and beautifully, waste away, like sweetest aromatic gums, 
in sighs and tears before the offended Majesty of God. 
happy they who love with such a love ! for they have 
reached that height of virtue which the philosopher saw 
only as an ideal before him, to feel pleasure and pain, when 
and where we ought ! sweetest of all noviciates for hea- 
ven ! to have their hearts on fire on earth, burning the 
sweet perfumes of human love before the throne of the In- 
carnate Word! To them, true dovelike souls, especially 
belongs that tender benediction, Blessed are they that 
mourn ; for they shall be comforted. 

It is to be observed of the four kinds of love already de- 
scribed, that their characteristic is disinterestedness. It is 
not that self is expressly excluded, aj a false spirituality 
would teach, but that it is undeveloped. It is not rejected, 
but it is passed over. In the next two kinds of love it 
occupies, and without reproof, a much more prominent 
position. 

If the quiet eye and the profound heart of the contem- 
plative Mary delights in that love of condolence, which is 
such a favorite love with cloistered souls, the love of grati- 
tude better suits the external diligence of the active Mar- 
tha. The love of gratitude is pre-eminently a mindful love. 
It ponders things and lays them up in its heart, as our 
Blessed Lady did. It meditates fondly on the past, as 
Jacob did. It sings of old mercies, and makes much of 
them, like David in the Psalms. It enters largely into the 
composition of the Missal and Breviary of the Church. 
Where another has the memory of his sins continually 
before him, a soul possessed with the love of gratitude is 
perpetually haunted by a remembrance of past benefits ; 
and his abiding sorrow for sin is a sort of affectionate and 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 211 

self-reproachful reaction from his wonder at the abundant 
loving-kindness of God. The hideousness of sin is all the 
more brought out, when the light of God^s love is thrown 
so strongly on it. Hence it comes to pass that a very 
grateful man is also a deeply penitent man ; and as the ex- 
cess of benefits tends to lower us in our own esteem, so we 
are humble in proportion to our gratitude. But this love 
does not rest in the luxurious sentiment of gratitude. It 
breaks out into actual and ardent thanksgiving; and its 
thankfulness is not confined to words. Promptitude of 
obedience, heroic efi'ort, and gay perseverance, these are all 
tokens of the love of gratitude. It is loyal to God. Loyalty 
is the distinguishing feature of its service. It is constantly 
on the look out for opportunities, and makes them when it 
cannot find them, to testify its allegiance to God ; not as if 
it was doing any great thing, or as if it was laying God ^ 
under any obligation, but as if it was making payment, 
part payment and tardy payment, by little instalments, for 
the immensity of His love. It is an exuberant, active, 
bright-faced love, very attractive and therefore apostolic, 
winning souls, preaching God unconsciously, and though 
certainly busied about many things, yet all of them the 
things of God. Happy the man whose life is one long Te 
Deum ! He will save his soul, but he will not save it alone, 
but many others also. Joy is not a solitary thing, and he 
will come at last to His Master's feet, bringing many others 
rejoicing with him, the resplendent trophies of his grateful 
love. 

But the love which has most to do with self is the love 
of desire, or, as theologians often call it, the love of concu- 
piscence. Saints and sinners, the perfect and the imperfect, 
the young and old, the penitent and the innocent, the clois- 
tered and uncloistered, all must meet in the sanctuary of 
this love, and draw waters with gladness from its celestial 
fountains. What rational creature but must desire God, 



212 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

and desire Him with an infinite and irresistible desire ? 
What created understanding but longs to be flooded with 
His sweet light ? What created will but languishes to be 
set on fire by the ardor of His ecstatic love? Daniel is 
called in Scripture the man of desires. Most beautiful of 
appellations ! as if he yearned so eagerly for God, that he 
should pass into an honorable proverb to the end of time ! 
How beautiful the sight if we could see with the eyes of 
some sublime intelligence, how this desire of God is the 
whole beauty and the whole order of His vast creation, 
drawing onwards to himself across the spiritual realms of 
angelic holiness, or over the land and sea, the mountains 
and the vales, of earth, numberless created intellects and 
walls, and by as many various paths as there are intellects 
and wills to draw. The tide of all creation sets in with 
• resistless currents to the throne of the Creator. It is this 
desire w^iich saves and justifies, which crowns and glorifies. 
It is this love which is heightened and made more exquisite 
by the tremulousness of holy fear."^ glorious constraints 
of this heavenly concupiscence ! It is a love which makes 
us not only desire God, but desire Him supremely above all 
things. It makes us desire Him only, Him always, and 
Him intensely ; and it allures us with untyrannical exclu- 
siveness to seek Him in all things here, and to long for 

* Beatus vir qui timet Dominvim. Qua ratione beatus ? Quia in mandatis 
ejus cupit nimis. S. Ambrose. A similar statement, made by the Author 
some years ago in All for Jesus, was animadverted on as inaccurnte. It had 
not however been made without both thought and reading. The expression 
of St. Paul, desiderium habens dissolvi et esse cum Christo, is au act of the 
love of desire, 1. from the force of terms ; 2. on the ancient authority of St. 
Basil, de. reg. fus. disput., cap. 2; 3. on the modern authority of Bolgeni. 
Amor di Div., p. i., c. ii. iii.; and that such a love, so expressed, is an heroic 
love, is asserted on the authority of S. Thomas. 2. 2. qu. xxiv. art. 8. 9. This 
was the authority on which the statement in All for Jesus was made, and 
in consequence of the criticism on that passage, the references have been 
verified, the statement reconsidered, and the doctrine of it here re-asserted in 
its natural place. 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 213 

Him as being Himself our sole sufficient and magnificent 
Hereafter. By this love both high and low are saved ; and 
without it was none ever saved that was saved. A saint, 
if such an one could be, fit to be canonized for all things 
else, for the want of this love would be lost eternally ; and 
the death-bed penitent, who has never known a higher love, 
will be saved by this alone. And do we really desire aught 
else but God? Or at least can we desire aught but sub- 
ordinately to Him, and far below our longing for His un- 
speakable recompense, which is Himself? There is nothing 
to satisfy us but God alone. All things weary us, and fade. 
He alone is ever fresh, and His love is daily like a new 
discovery to our souls. sweet thirst for God ! Fair love 
of supernatural desire ! Thou canst wean us better far from 
earth, and teach us better the nothingness of human things, 
than the cold, slow experience of wise old age, or the swift 
sharp science of suffering, loss, and pain ! 

There is still another love. We hardly know whether to 
call it a child of heaven or of earth. It is the love of ado- 
ration. It is a love too quiet for benevolence, too deep for 
complacency, too passive for condolence, too contemplative 
for gratitude ; but which has grown up out of the loves of 
preference and desire, and is, besides, the perfection of all 
the other loves. It is too much possessed with God to be 
accurately conscious of the nature of its own operations. 
It finds no satisfaction except in worship. It comes so near 
to the vastness of God that it beholds Him only obscurely, 
and instead of definite perfections in God, sees only a bright 
darkness, which floods its whole being and transforms it 
into itself. It is passive ; God gives it when He wills. We 
cannot earn it. Efforts would rather backen it, if it was 
near, than bring it on or win it into the soul. It waits 
rather than seeks. God is as if He were all Will to it. 
His power. His wisdom. His sanctity, they all melt into 
His will ; and all that comes to this love is His will, and 



214 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

except of that Will, it can take no distinct cognisance of 
anything either in heaven or on earth. Self goes out of it, 
and enters into that will, and is only contemplated in it, 
although it is eternally separate and essentially distinct. 
It is oblivious of itself, as being one with God. Its life is 
wonder, silence, ecstasy. The operations of grace are sim- 
plified into one, and the power of grace which is concen- 
trated in that one is above words ; and that single action is 
the production of an unspeakable self-abasement. It can- 
not be told. But such was the humility of the Sacred 
Heart, and such the strange loveliness of the sinless Mother, 
who so mightily attracted God and drew Ilim down into 
her bosom. As the morning sky is all sufi'used with pearly 
hues from the unrisen sun, so is the mind, though still on 
earth, in this love of adoration, all silently suffused, and 
flushed, and mastered by a most exquisite repose, which 
can come alone from that Beatific Vision which has not 
risen yet upon the soul. 

These are the seven loves whereby the creature man can 
love His beneficent Creator. These are the seven liturgies, 
ancient, authentic, universal liturgies of the human heart. 
Truly it is little we can do for God, and yet how immea- 
surably more than we have done for Him as yet. A treatise 
might be written to reduce these loves to practice,^ and to 
illustrate them copiously with the examples of the saints. 
But that is not our object now. Has earth any pleasure, 
of an intellectual, moral, or material sort, to compare with 
the fruition of a repentant life passed in the occupations 
of these various loves ? The penitent seeks peace, and the 
end of all love is peace, peace and languishing desire, 
peace in the assured hope of the soul, and pining for the 
ever-coming, still delaying Face of Jesus in the eastern 



* The reader must not confound these different kinds of love "with the 
difft^rent states of love expounded in mystical theology. 



OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 215 

clouds : that east from which He will one day come. Before 
the dawn of day, a huge toppling mass of unwieldy cloud 
came up from the west horizon. With incredible swiftness 
and the loud roaring of sudden wind, it covered like a pall 
the brilliant moonlit heavens, and deluged the earth with 
slanting columns of whirling rain. It passed on. A star 
came out, and then another, and at last the moon ; and 
then the storm drove onward to the east, towards the sea, 
murky and purple, and all at once a lunar rainbow 
spanned the black arch of heaven; and it seemed as if 
Jesus should have come, beneath that bow, and through 
that purple cloud that was barring the gates of the sun- 
rise ; but the wind was lulled, and all was still, by the time 
the moon had built that bow upon the cloud. And what 
is all this but a figure of our lives, one of nature's daily 
parables, of which we might make so much ? Ours is a 
pilgrimage, a pilgrimage by night, beneath the gentle 
moon, from west to east, from the sunset to the sunrise ; it 
is not like our natural life from east to west, from youth to 
age, from our rising to our setting ; and we shall best be- 
guile the way, and let the storms go unheeded over, if we 
make God's "justifications our songs in the house of our 
pilgrimage,'' and relieve our weariness by the various 
magnificence of these seven canonical services of our super- 
natural love. 

These are the loves we were made for. They are our 
means of loving God. If we think too much of their mag- 
nificence, we may forget the exceeding loveliness of God. 
Look at a saint who has loved heroically with these seven 
loves, for even the love of desire may be heroic, and see 
how little with all of them he has done for God. He has 
not paid one of the least of the commonest of God's count- 
less benefits. This is a sad thought, and for us, who are 
not saints, a grave consideration. For remember how few 
saints there are, and also how far off from their love is 



216 OUR MEANS OF LOVING GOD. 

ours ! Oh the majesty of God ! how it is left desolate, and 
unrequited ! Yet think again of the mysteriously huge 
price which God puts upon even our little love, and upon 
the least of our little love ! How can it be ? What can it 
mean? When once we go deep into this subject of Divine 
Love, mysteries thicken more and more. God alone can 
give an account of His own love, and of how His unerring 
wisdom comes to mistake the real price of ours. beau- 
tiful Goodness of God ! why are we not really beside our- 
selves with love of Thee ? 



OL'R ACTUAL LOYE OF GOD. 217 



CHAPTER IV. 

OUR ACTUAL LOYE OF GOD. 

A VOLUNTARY thought and a deliberate desire are not 
less actions in the sight of God than the words of our 
mouths or the operations of our hands. How wonderful, 
therefore, is it to reflect on the countless multitudes of 
strong and vigorous acts which are rising up before the 
majesty of God from the unsleeping world of angels. Their 
active intellects with incredible swiftness vary their love 
and praise, their wonder and admiration, almost inces- 
santly. They sweep all regions of creation with instanta- 
neous flight, and bring back on their wings the odor of 
God^s glory and His goodness, to present as worship before 
His face : though in their boldest flights they have come 
nigh no limits of His all-embracing presence. Another 
while, they plunge deep down and out of sight in some one 
of His mysterious and profound perfections, and rise again 
and scatter gladness round them, while their thoughts are 
as showers of light falling beautifully before His throne. 
Or again they return through the gates of the heavenly 
Jerusalem, like laborers wending homeward in the even- 
ing, bringing with them troops of human souls, dug out 
of the fires of purgatory, or disentangled from the briars 
of earth. In every one of their bright actions there flashes 
forth, as an additional beauty, their joyous dependence on 
the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, and their placid obedience 
to His Human Mother. There is harmony too in the im- 
mense diversities of their unnumbered acts, and they all 

T 



218 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

make one vast unutterable concord of spiritual music in 
the ear of God. And all is sinless there. No taint, no spot, 
no venial fault, in all tliat universe of abundant energy and 
of lightning-like actiYitj. Its exuberance of sanctity is 
unflagging and everlasting. God be praised for His good- 
ness in securing at least thus much vrorship for Himself! 

A heart that loves God is often fain, for very weariness 
and sorrow, to rest upon the thought of that angelic world, 
and to talk of it in secret colloquies with its own affection- 
ate and faithful guardian angel. Yet the heart cannot rest 
there long ; it cannot rest there finally. For, in truth, no 
one act of that angelic worship is altogether worthy of the 
Most High. The whole concourse of marvellous adoration, 
taken as one grand act, falls short of the exceeding majesty 
of God, and simply falls short infinitely. God is very good, 
to rejoice in it with that abounding complacency. But it 
is only another of His condescensions. It is only another 
proof that He is, in some mysterious manner, wisely beside 
Himself with love of His finite and imperfect creatures. 
If they have been proclaiming His praise in their tran- 
scendent hymns for millions and millions of ages, th^y 
have not yet paid Him, they never will have paid Him, for 
the single creation of any one, the humblest, of their count- 
less hosts. And what the}^ give Him, is it not all His own 
already? Did He not evoke them out of nothing, beautiful 
and radiant as they are ? Is He not pouring bright streams 
of being into their deep, wide natures, with assiduous mu- 
nificence, each moment of a never-ending immortality? 
Yet man, poor man, may well rest awhile his tired and 
shamefaced heart upon this angelic world of beautiful 
obedience, and the ravishing tranquillity of its energetic 
love. 

The world of human actions is much more limited; espe- 
cially if we regard only the inhabitants of earth. Never- 
theless, to our apprehension, it possesses immense capabi- 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 219 

litles for the worship and the love of God. Each one of 
those seven loves which we considered in the last chapter, 
is capable of almost as many changes and as many distinct 
peculiarities, as there are souls on earth. Take away the 
hours spent in sleep, the years before the use of reason, 
the dotage of extreme old age, and the amount of insanity 
in the world, and still, what a vast number of human 
actions call for God's concurrence, and are performed in 
His sight in the four-and-twenty hours ! Yet none of these 
actions need be indifferent, in the individual case. All of 
them can glorify God, and the least of them attain success- 
fully a supernatural end. There are the hundreds of thou- 
sands collected in the great manufacturing cities of the 
European nations, with all the sleepless activity of mind 
and heart which characterizes them. There are the wan- 
dering hordes of the desert or the steppe. The. crowded 
cities of the east, the masses of Africa, the swiftly growing 
populations of the new world, the well-peopled islands of 
the broad ocean, and those who dwell near the arctic snows. 
If we bring before ourselves hill and vale, the riverside 
and wood, the sea-shore and the pastoral plain, and re- 
member how vast and various are the experiences of human 
joy and sorrow which are going on in almost every one of 
the numberless inequalities of the earth^s surface, we shall 
be overwhelmed by the calculation of the human actions 
which are ever being performed. 

Now each one of these actions belongs to God by four 
different titles, and may be referred to Him by as many 
different sentiments of gratitude and love. His dominion 
over us is founded on His having created us, on His con- 
tinuing to preserve us, on His redeeming us, and on His 
being our last end, our final cause. These are not so much 
four separate actions, four distinct mercies, the one separ- 
able from the other, as the prolongation and perfection of 
one divine action, namely our creation out of nothing. 



220 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

Preservation, as we have already seen, is indivisibly one 
act w^ith creation. Redemption is the preservation of our 
supernatural life, without which the preservation of our 
being would seem, not imperfect only, but hardly a benefit. 
While the tie, which binds us to God as being our Last 
End, is at once the cause of creation and its efi'ect, the 
crown and consummation of the whole work of God. We 
may be almost said to belong more entirely to God by this 
last relationship than by any other. But all the four 
ought to enter more or less into every human action. We 
have no right to eat, or drink, or recreate ourselves without 
seeking with more or less determinate intention the four- 
fold glory of God as our Creator, Preserver, Redeemer, 
and Last End : and a mere mental reference to Him by a 
loving heart is sufficient thus to ennoble our most trivial 
doings, and to fasten it firmly to the throne of God. 

Perhaps we have not as much devotion as we ought to 
have to that relation in which God stands to us as our 
Last End. We think of Him as our Creator and our 
Father, and these titles so abound in sweetness that they 
flood our souls with delight, and we cannot tear ourselves 
away from such heavenly contemplations. Or when our 
spirits are all freshly bathed in the cold fountains of holy 
fear, we look up to God with childlike and well-pleased 
awe, as our all-holy judge and omnipotent irresponsible 
king. It is less common with us to meditate upon Him 
and to worship Him as our Last End, and it seems as if 
our spiritual life sometimes sufi'ered from the omission. 
For this relation of Last End brings God before us in a 
manner peculiarly divine, and to which no earthly or 
heavenly relationship can furnish either parallel or simili- 
tude. It puts the whole of practical religion in a clear 
and undoubted light. It explains all difficulties and 
answers all objections. There is no satisfaction short of 
God, no completeness out of God, no support but in God, 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 221 

no rest but upon God, no breathing-time or halting-place 
except on the Bosom of our Heavenly Father, He is the 
end to which we are travelling. Like a stone falling on 
the earth, so are we evermore falling upon God. Creation 
is not solid ground. It lets us through, and we do not 
stop until we come to God. He is not one of our ends, 
but the end of ends, our only end. There is none other 
end but He. All things else are means. It is this truth 
which simplifies our lives, and which simplified the lives 
of the saints until they were pictures and reflections of His 
own simplicity. So also if God be our Last End, He is our 
only home. We are strangers everywhere else but in 
God. All things are foreign to us except God ; and thus 
all our love of home and country, of kith and kin, melts 
away into the single love of God. He is the home where 
our welcome is certain, and surpasses all our expectations. 
He is our rest where alone we can lie down without fear, 
and sleep sweetly. He in His inaccessible splendor is the 
beautiful night wherein no man works, but when the 
weary laborer reposes from his toil in everlasting bliss. 
He is the cool and fragrant evening, in whose endless sun- 
set creation clothes itself with its final beauty, and reposes 
in its golden beams, and all sounds of work and all sighs 
of care are suspended, and all cravings satisfied, and all 
created spirits filled with an ecstatic life, so full, so glorious, 
so far-reaching, that the most untiring energies of earth 
are but as dreary indolence compared with its magnificent 
tranquillity. 

But we must return to the world of human actions. 
Who could number, at any one given moment, the multi- 
tude of such actions on the earth, the pains endured, the sor- 
rows borne, the anxieties combated, the temptations resisted, 
the words spoken, the thoughts thought, the actions done, 
all of which the heart of man can multiply and vary and 
complicate well nigh a hundred times a minute ? All these 
t2 



222 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

things are the raw material of our love of God, and all can 
enter into those seven kinds of loving worship which we 
considered in the last chapter, and all can have a different 
character of supernatural holiness impressed upon them, 
according to the four different titles under which we may 
refer them to God, as our Creator, Preserver, Eedeemer, 
and Last End. But alas ! is not this beautiful human 
worship like a fair dream of some possible creation, which 
may be, but has not been yet? How much of these trea- 
sures of our hearts does our Heavenly Father actually re- 
ceive ? Truly the tribes of men are like a wilderness, 
capable of cultivation, where corn and wine and oil might 
come abundantly from the bosom of the earth, and flowers 
bloom, and tall forests grow, and cattle feed, but which 
now is little else than sand, and stony plain, and low 
bushes, wearying the eye by the very expanse of its cheer- 
less monotony. 

Yet when in our love of God, and fretted with the feeble- 
ness of our own worthless endeavors, we turn to the world 
of angelic actions, and feed ourselves upon its fragrant and 
refreshing fulness, we not only soon come to feel how far 
below the majesty of God is even that transcendent wor- 
ship, but we rest at last on human acts as after all the sole 
exclusive adequate worship of the Adorable Trinity. Our 
eye lingers on the fertile heart of the Virgin Mother, but 
there is no rest for it even there ; and what we seek for 
God, in our sympathy and affection for His slighted good- 
ness, we find only in the human actions of the Incarnate 
Word, in the countless known and unknown momentary 
mysteries of the Three and Thirty Years, and in the multi- 
plied lives, the daily births, and daily crucifixions, of the 
altar and the tabernacle. There we behold the Incompre- 
hensible Majesty of the Most High compassed with a wor- 
ship equal to Himself, as deep, and broad, and high, and 
bountiful as His own blessed Self. There we see His in- 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 223 

fiuity worshipped infinitely, with an infinite worship almost 
infinitely multiplied, and infinitely repeated, in the Sacred 
Heart of Jesus. We would almost rather be men than 
angels, because these are human actions, and that is a hu- 
man Heart. Jesus is man, and not an angel. But then 
He is God Himself; and so it is after all to Himself, and 
not to His creation, that he owes this beautiful sufficient 
worship. Shall we sorrow then, and cry alas ! because no 
where is God rightly loved and adequately worshipped, and 
because the service of the Sacred Heart turns out to be in 
fact His owm ? no ! rather let us bless Him again and 
again that He is such a God that none can worship Him as 
He deserves, that all which is good is at last discovered to 
be either Himself or at least His own, that all beautiful 
things come out of His goodness, and go into it again, and 
are inseparably mixed up with it, and that we only lose 
ourselves more and more inextricably in the labyrinth of 
His sovereign goodness the deeper we penetrate into that 
dear and awful sanctuary. 

But we must strive to enter more minutely into the 
labyrinth of our own manifold unworthiness. We have 
seen, in the last chapter, in what v^ays and to what extent 
it is in our power, with the aid of His grace, to love Al- 
mighty God. That inquiry was but a preface to this fur- 
ther one. As a matter of fact, how do w^e actually love 
Him? What is the positive amount of our love of God? 
From all this world of human actions, what sort of pro- 
portion does He receive, and with what dispositions is the 
lax paid? Let us try to make ourselves masters of the 
statistics of the kingdom of God. Even if it be little in 
amount which we pay to God, yet much depends on the 
spirit with which it is paid. Little things are enhanced 
by the manner in which they are done, and the intention 
out of which they spring. Let us see, then, how our gene- 



224 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

rosity ennobles the meanness and enriches the poverty of 
our love. 

If we look at mankind vrith reference to their service of 
God, we may divide them into three classes, comprising 
two extremes and a mean. The one extreme is occupied 
by the saints, the second by the great mass of men, and 
the mean by ordinary believers, such as we ourselves may 
be. By studying each of these three divisions, we shall 
obtain something like a clear view of the actual love of 
creatures for their Creator. 

The first thing which strikes us about the saints, is the 
extraordinary fewness of them. Those who are canonized 
bear no sort of proportion, in any one generation, to the 
numbers of the baptized ; and if we multiply their number 
a hundred times, so as to include the hidden saints whom 
it is not God's will that the Church should raise upon her 
altars, still, the grievous disproportion will scarcely be 
perceptibly diminished. Let us grant the largest probable 
allowance for extraordinary sanctity hidden in the silent 
cells of the Carthusians, or in other lives, cloistered or not, 
of singular abasement and abjection, nevertheless, we may 
suppose the number of saints in any age to fall far below 
the number of baptized infants who die before the use of 
reason, and perhaps not to equal the number of deathbed 
conversions. If we love God really and truly, surely this 
consideration cannot help but be a painful one. And yet 
it seems so easy to be a saint ! Graces are so overwhelm- 
ingly abundant, and God Himself so unspeakably attrac- 
tive, that it appears harder to be ungenerous with Him 
than to be generous ; and where perfection is made to con- 
sist simply in the fervor and purity of our love, there is 
almost an intellectual difficulty in comprehending why it is 
that the saints should be so few. 

But it is not only the fewness of their number which we 
must consider. We must think also of the immensity of 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 22o 

tlio graces which they receive. We often get a sight, in 
times of recollection and prayer, of the fearful way in 
which our own practice falls short of the graces we receive. 
Nothing makes us feel our own baseness more keenly or 
more lastingly than this. Perhaps the disproportion be- 
tween the practice of the saints and the graces which they 
actually receive, may be almost as large as it is in our own 
case. At any rate, we cannot read their lives without 
being struck with the unused and unemployed profusion 
of grace by which their souls are deluged. Now all this 
is God's own outlay. It is what He spends in order to 
obtain saints ; and if we measure extraordinary heights 
of sanctity by the greatness and variety of the graces given, 
we shall see that even the holiness of an apostle will seem 
to be but a poor return for so prodigal an expenditure of 
grace. Our Lord once spoke of virtue going out of Him, 
when a poor woman touched Him that she might be miracu- 
lously healed. So we may almost define a saint to be one 
who drains God's abundance more than others do, and 
costs God more. He is but crowning His own gifts, when 
He vouchsafes to crown His saints. So is it always when 
we come to look into the interests and affairs of God's glory. 
It is at His own expense that He is served. He furnishes 
the banquet to which He is invited. Like earthly fathers, 
He must give to His children the riches out of which they 
may make their offerings to Him. His liberality supplies 
the means, while His condescension stoops graciously to 
receive back again what was His own in its first fulness, 
but which has wasted and faded not a little in the transfer 
through our hands. 

But even at the best, if we make the most of the gene- 
rous and heroic love of the saints, it is absolutely vile as 
compared either with its object or with their grace. It is 
not enough that the little which they give is already rather 
His than theirs ; but it is also in itself unworthy of His 
15 



226 OUK ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

transcending greatness and surpassing goodness. Even the 
saints are unprofitable servants. The chosen apostles of 
the Incarnate Word were taught so to look upon themselves. 
Yet these saints are the good extreme among men. From 
them, if from any, may God look for a plentiful harvest of 
glory. Their purity of intention, their intensity of love, 
their generosity of self-sacrifice, are the pastures in which 
His glory is to feed. Yet even here how poor, how scanty, 
how irregular is the return of the creature to the All-merci- 
ful Creator ! He has all the work to do Himself which He 
pays them for doing ; and when they have somewhat marred 
the beauty of His design, He accepts their work as if on 
the one hand He did not perceive its imperfection, and on 
the other did not recognise that all the goodness and the 
beauty of it were His own. How then must our Heavenly 
Father condescend to value the worship and the loyalty of 
a free created will ! And how true it is that even the 
magnificence of the saints is after all but meanness, in re- 
spect of the boundless majesty and overwhelming holiness 
of Him upon whose grace they live, and by whose Blood 
they are redeemed 1 

If we turn from the saints to the other extreme, the mass 
of men, the vision which we are constrained to look upon is 
truly of the darkest and most disheartening description. 
By the side of the multitude, the heroism of the saints does 
indeed appear falsely magnified into the most gigantic 
dimensions. Can anything be said of men's ignorance of 
God, but that it is boundless, universal, incredible ? Could 
the lives of men be what they are, if they had so much as 
the commonest elements of the knowledge of God ? Do not 
millions act and speak and think, as if God was of a lower 
nature than themselves ? Do they not attribute to Him an 
indifi"erence to right and wrong, which they would consider 
revolting in a fellow-creature ? Or again, do they not so 
completely overlook Him as to forget His existence, and to 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 227 

live as if there were no one to consult but themselves, no 
will to satisfy except their own ? With many it would 
almost be doing God too great an honor to be at the pains 
to deny His existence ; and others only advert to His per- 
fections to dishonor them by their unmanly superstitions. 
Indeed in such complete ignorance of God do crowds of 
men live, that we could not have credited the possibility of 
it, if our own observation had not presented it to us as a 
fact which no reasonable man could doubt. 

Moreover it by no means appears that, with the appalling 
corruption of our nature, the knowledge of God is sufficient 
to secure for Him even our esteem. Horrible to relate, 
aversion to God is far from being uncommon among His 
creatures. There are many bold and impenitent sinners 
who are devils before their time, to whom the Name of God 
or His perfections are not so much terrible as they are 
odious. When they come in sight of His commandments, 
or of some manifestation of His sovereignty, or even some 
beautiful disclosure of His tenderness, they are like pos- 
sessed persons. They are so exasperated as to forget them- 
selves, until their passion hurries them on to transgress, 
not only the proprieties of language, but even the decorum 
of outward behavior. There seems to be something preter- 
naturally irritating to them in the very mention of God, 
quite irrespective of the absolute dominion which He claims 
over them as their Creator. There are others, whose ha- 
bitual state of mind, when they approach religious subjects, 
is to be on their guard against God, as if there were some 
dangerous subtilty in the greatness of His wisdom, or some 
artful overbearing tyranny in the condescensions of His 
majesty, or some dishonest concealed purpose in the invi- 
tations of His mercy. With these men the probabilities 
are against God. He is not likely to mean well. It is 
safest to distrust Him. Discretion must beware of Him. 
Moderation must not be excited by Him. We must not let 



228 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

Him throw us out of our wise sobriety. He has come to 
bargain with us, and we must be vigilant, or we do not 
know to what we may be induced to commit ourselves. 
With such men their first thought of God is to dishonor 
Him ; for how shall a son doubt his father without doing 
him dishonor? 

There are others who are not by any means to be 
reckoned among the mass of men, and who serve Him truly 
with a holy fear, but who seem not to have escaped alto- 
gether the contagion of this aversion to God. With them 
it shows itself in the shape of uneasiness, perplexity, and 
doubt. They entertain suspicions against the perfections 
of God^s justice or the universality of His compassion. 
When they hear of certain things, jealousy of God starts 
up as it were unbidden in their hearts. It is not so much 
that they have definite intellectual difficulties in matters 
of faith. But they have not that instantaneous and un- 
clouded certainty, that all is right, and best, and exquisitely 
tender, where God is concerned, which is the pure sun- 
shine and invigorating air of the atmosphere of faith. 
Nay, have we not all of us moods, in which an allusion 
to God makes us impatient; and is not this fact alone 
the nearest of any fact to a deep-sea sounding of our cor- 
ruption ? 

It is hard to see what God has done to deserve all this. 
It seems most unkind, most cruelly disloyal to the immen- 
sity of His goodness, and to the unalterable bounty of His 
compassionate dominion. Truly, He is our King as well 
as our Father, our Master as well as our Friend. But are 
the relations incompatible ? It is the very necessity of our 
case as creatures, that we must be under a law ; and could 
we be under laws less numerous, less onerous, than those 
under which we are laid by the unchangeable perfections 
of God ? Easy laws, few laws, and laws which it is our 
own interest to keep — these are the characteristics of the 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 229 

dominion of God. Why then are we restless and uneasy, 
and not rather happily lost in amazement at the goodness 
of our great Creator? It seems wonderful that He who 
is so great should also be so good; and it is the joyous 
lesson which the sands of life teach us, as they run yearly 
out, that His very greatness is the only blessed measure of 
His goodness. 

But ignorance of God and aversion to God are not of 
themselves a sufficient description of the religious condi- 
tion of the great mass of men. There are multitudes also 
who are simply indifferent to God. It sounds incredible. 
The mere knowledge that there is a God should be enough 
to shape, control, revolutionize, and govern the whole world. 
And this, quite independent of the minute, infallible, and 
touching knowledge of Him which revelation gives us. But 
when that is added, surely it should be enough to strike 
indifference out of the list of possible things. Surely every 
human heart should be awake, and alert, to hear the sound 
of God's voice, or discern His footprints on the earth. Our 
Creator, our Last End, our Saviour, our Judge, upon whom 
•we depend for everything, whose will is the only one import- 
ant thing to us, whose Bosom is the one only possible home 
for us — and He to be regarded as simply the most unin- 
teresting object in His own world ! Is this really credible ? 
Alas ! we have only to look around and see. Does a day 
pass which does not prove it to us? Nay, very often, to 
our shame be it spoken, is it not a considerable exertion, 
even to us to interest ourselves in God ? And this indiffer- 
ence, can we be quite sure that it is less dishonorable to 
God than positive aversion ? 

These are melancholy results. Yet somehow they spur 
us on to try to do more for God ourselves, and to love Him 
with a purer and more disinterested love. Alas ! if the 
saints are few in number, those who are either ignorant of 
God, or indifferent to Him, or have an aversion to Him, 

u 



230 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

are countless multitudes. Many fair regions of this beau- 
tiful world are peopled by idolaters. The sacred places of 
scriptural Asia are tenanted by the followers of Mahomet. 
Heresy and schism usurp whole countries., which boast of 
the name of Christian ; and even in catholic lands, it is 
depressing to think how many thousands there are, who 
must be classed with those who are not on the side of God. 
These are very practical considerations ; for if there is the 
least honesty in our professions of loving God, they must 
greatly influence both the fervor of our devotion and the 
amount of our mortification. They bring home to us that 
suffering and expiatory character, which, by a law of the 
Incarnation, belongs to all Christian holiness. 

But we shall find considerations even yet more practical, 
if we turn from these two extremes to the mean, that is, to 
ordinarily pious catholics, such as we humbly hope we 
either are ourselves, or are endeavoring to become. We 
distinctly aim at making religion the great object of our 
lives. We are conscious to ourselves of a real and strong 
desire to love God, and as we gro.w older the desire grows 
stronger, and, to say the least of it, it bids fair to swallow 
up all our other desires, and become the one single object 
of our lives. The four last things. Death and Judgment, 
Hell and Heaven, are often before us, and fill us with 
a holy terror. We fear sin greatly, and we sometimes 
think we almost hate it for its own sake, because it is 
an ofience against so good a God. We have times and 
methods of prayer. We examine our consciences. We 
hear mass often. We visit the Blessed Sacrament. We 
are devout to our Lady. We frequent the sacraments. 
Who can doubt but that all this is the way of salvation ? 
We are happy in the grace which enables us to do all this. 
We shall be happy indeed in the grace which will enable 
us to persevere. We are happy also in the thought that 
there are thousands and thousands in the Church who are 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 231 

thus serving God. But let us look a little more closely into 
this, and examine our lives first as to the amount of love of 
God which they exhibit, and secondly as to the mannei^ in 
which we show our love. 

There are twenty-four hours in the day, so many days in 
the week, and so many weeks in the year. We have various 
occupations, and manifold ways of spending our time ; and 
the most careless amongst us must have some confused and 
general notion of the way in which his time is distributed. 
Now we know that the service of God is the grand thing, 
or rather that it is the only thing about us which is great 
at all. What amount of our time then is spent upon it? 
How many hours of the day are passed in prayer, and 
spiritual reading, in hearing mass, or visiting the Blessed 
Sacrament, or in other direct spiritual exercises? Of the 
time necessarily expended upon our worldly avocations, or 
the claims of society, how much is spent with any recollec- 
tion of Him, or with any actual intention to do our common 
actions for His glory ? Can we return a satisfactory answer 
to these questions? Furthermore, we know that it is essen- 
tial to our love of God, that we should appreciate Him above 
all things. Does our practice show that this is anything 
but a form of words with us ? Would strangers, who looked 
critically at our daily lives, be obliged to say that, whatever 
faults we had, it was plain that we put no such price on 
anything as on God? When we look into the interests and 
affections of our busy, crowded hearts, is it plain that, if 
the love of God does not reign there in solitary, unmingled 
splendor, at least it takes easy, obvious, and acknowledged 
precedence of all our other loves ? This is not asking much : 
but can we answer as we should wish ? Again, our actions 
are perfectly multitudinous. If we reckon both the out- 
ward and the inward ones, they are almost as numerous as 
the beatings of our pulse. How many of them are for God ? 
I do not say how many are directly religious, but how many 



232 OUR ACTUAL LOYE OF GOD. 

are at all and in any sense for God ? How many in the 
hundred ? Even if we are quite clear that a virtual inten- 
tion has really got vigor and vitality enough to carry us 
over the breadth of a whole day, and to push its way through 
the crowd of things we have to think, to say, to do, and to 
suffer, — and this is a very large assumption — is this virtual 
intention in the morning to absolve us from the necessity 
of any further advertence to God, and must it not also 
have been made in the morning with a very considerable 
degree of intensity, in order to propel it for so long as 
twenty -four hours through such a resisting medium as we 
know our daily lives to be ? To use our national word, are 
we quite comfortable about this ? Are we sure of our view 
about virtual intention, and without misgivings, and have 
we found our theory work well in times gone by ? 

God does not have His own way in the world. What He 
gets He has to fight for. What is true of the world at large, 
is true also of our own hearts and lives. Though we love 
God, and most sincerely. He has to struggle for our love. 
He has to contend for the mastery over our affections. The 
preferences of our corrupt nature are not for Him, or for 
His concerns. Thus it happens almost daily that His claims 
clash with those of self or of the world. We have to choose 
between the two, and give the preference to the one over 
the other. We are for ever having Christ and Barabbas 
offered to the freedom of our election. Now do we always 
give the preference to God? Or if not always, because of 
surprises, impulses, impetuosities, or sudden weaknesses, 
at least do we never wilfully, deliberately, and with adver- 
tence, prefer anything else to God, and give Him the second 
place ? And of the innumerable times in which this conflict 
occurs, in what proportion of times does God carry off the 
victory ? And when He does, is it an easy victory ? Or 
has He to lay long siege to our hearts, and bring up rein- 
forcement after reinforcement of fresh and untired grace, 



OUR xiCTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 233 

until at last it looks as if He were almost going to throw 
Himself on His omnipotence, and overwhelm the freedom 
of our will? Or again, let us look at the degree of appli- 
cation which we bestow on what we really do for God. Let 
us confront the carefulness, and forethought, and energy, 
and perseverance, which we bestow upon our temporal in- 
terests or the earthly objects of our love, with those which 
characterize our spiritual exercises. And will the result 
of the examination be altogether what we should desire? 

All these are childish and elementary questions to ask 
ourselves. Yet the results are far more melancholy than 
when we contemplated the ignorance, aversion, and indif- 
ference of the great mass of men. More melancholy, be- 
cause we profess to be God^s champions ; it is as it were 
our place to be on His side. We live encircled by His 
grace, which flows around us like the plentiful bright air. 
Our minds are illuminated by the splendors of heavenly 
truth, and our hearts led sweetly captive by the winning 
mysteries of the Incarnation. Our lives are charmed by 
great sacraments, and we are each of us the centre of a 
very world of invisible grandeurs and spiritual miracles. 
And in spite of all this, I will not say it is sad, it is really 
hardly credible that our love of God should amount to so 
little as it does, whether we regard it as to the time spent 
upon it, or as to the appreciation of Him above all things, 
or as to the proportion of our numberless actions which is 
for Him, or as to our preference of Him when His claims 
clash with others, or as to the degree of application which 
we bestow on what we really do for Him. look at all 
this by the moonlight of Gethsemane, or measure it with 
the Way of the Cross, or confront it with the abandonment 
of Calvary ! Turn upon it the light of the great love of 
Creation, whose prodigal munificence, and incomparable 
tenderness, and seemingly exaggerated compassions we 
have already contemplated ! can it be that this is the 

u2 



23-i OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

creature's return to his Creator, when the creature is holy 
and faithful and good, and that such is to be God's strong 
point in the world, the paradise of His delights, the portion 
of His empire where allegiance still is paid Him? Merci- 
ful Heaven ! can we be safe, if we go on thus ? Are we 
really in a state of grace ? Is not the whole spiritual life a 
cruel delusion? And are we not after all the enemies, and 
not the friends, of God? no ! faith comes to our rescue. 
All is right, though truly all is wrong. We are certainly 
in the way of salvation. Then we say once more, as we 
find ourselves saying many times a day, what a God is ours, 
what incredible patience, what unbounded forbearance, 
what unintelligible contentment ! Why is it that very 
shame does not sting us to do more for God, and to love 
Him with a love a little less infinitely unlike the love, 
with which, do what we can, we cannot hinder Him from 
loving us ? 

So much for the amount of our love of God. It is little ; 
so little that it would be disheartening, were it not always 
in our ow^n power, through the abundance of His grace, to 
make that little more. Let us now, at any rate, console 
ourselves by looking at the manner and spirit in which we 
pay to God this little love. Love, like other things, has 
certain rules and measures of its own. It has certain 
habits and characteristics. It proceeds upon known prin- 
ciples, which belong to its nature. It acts difi'erently from 
justice, because it is love and not justice. It does not obey 
the same laws as fear, simply because it is not fear but 
love. Every one knows the marks of true love. They are 
readiness, eagerness, generosity, swiftness, unselfishness, 
vigilance, exclusiveness, perseverance, exaggeration. In 
all these respects, except the last, our divine love must at 
once resemble and surpass our human love. In the last 
respect it cannot do so, because God is so infinitely beau- 
tiful and good, that anything like exaggeration or excess in 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 235 

the love of Him is impossible. The Sacred Heart of Jesus 
is the model of Divine Love. The Immaculate Heart of 
Mary ascertains for us the amazing heights of love which 
a simple creature can attain by correspondence to the grace 
of God. The Saints are all so many samples of divine 
love, in some one or more of its special characteristics and 
departments. We know, then, precisely the manner and 
spirit in which we are to love God. Let us see how far our 
practice squares with our theory. 

Is the following an unkind picture of ourselves? We 
serve God grudgingly, as if He were exacting. We are 
slow to do what we know He most desires, because it is an 
effort to ourselves. We cling to our own liberty, and we 
feel the service of God more or less of a captivity. Our 
whole demeanor and posture in religion is not as if we felt 
God was asking too little, or as if we were most anxious to 
do more than He required. We serve Him intermittingly, 
though perseverance is what He so specially desires. We 
have fits and starts, pious weeks or devout months, and 
then times of remissness, of effort, of coldness ; then a 
fresh awakening, a new start, and then a slackening again. 
It is as if loving God went against the grain, as if we had 
to constrain ourselves to love Him, as if it was an exertion 
which could not be kept up continuously, as if human 
holiness could never be anything better than endless be- 
ginnings, and trials which are always falling short of the 
mark. Thus we also love God rarely, under pressure, on 
great occasions, at startling times, or when we have sen- 
sible need of Him. All this looks as if we did not love 
Him for His own sake, but for ourselves, or for fear, or be- 
cause it is prudent and our duty. There is, unmistake- 
ably, a want of heart in the whole matter. 

Have we ever done any one action which we are quite 
confident was done solely and purely for the love of God ? 
If we have, it has not been often repeated. We are con- 



236 OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

scious to ourselves that there is a great admixture of 
earthly motives in our service of God. It is astonishing 
what an amount of vain-glory and self-seeking there is in 
our love of Him. We are also perfectly and habitually 
avrare of this ; and yet, v^hich is even more astonishing, 
we are quiet and unmoved. It breeds in us no holy despe- 
ration, nor does it inspire us to any vehement and deter- 
mined struggles to get rid of the desecrating presence of 
this unholy enemy. Nay, it almost appears as if we should 
never have dreamed of loving God, if He Himself had not 
been pleased to command us to do so ; and therefore we 
do it just in the way in which men always do a thing be- 
cause they are told, and which they would not have done 
if they had not been told. Many of us, perhaps, have 
already given the best of our lives to the world, and now 
it is the leavings only which go to God. Oh ! how often is 
He asked to drink the dregs of a cup which not the world 
only, but the devil also, have well-nigh drained before Him! 
and with what adorable condescension does He put His 
lips to it, and dwell with complacency upon the draught, 
as if it were the new wine of some archangel's first un- 
blemished love ! 

Then, again, we exaggerate our own services, in thought 
if not in words; and this shows itself in our demeanor. 
True love never thinks it has done enough. Its restlessness 
comes from the very uneasiness of this impression. Now, 
this is not at all our feeling about God. We do not look at 
things from His point of view. It is only by a painfully- 
acquired habit of mind that we come to do so. Half the 
temptations against the faith, from which men suffer, arise 
from the want of this habit, from not discerning that really 
the creature has no side, no right to a point of view, but 
that God's side is the only side, and the Creator's point of 
view the creature's only point of view, and that he would 
not be a creature were it otherwise. Another unsatisfac- 



OUR ACTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 237 

tory sign is, that, ordinarily speaking, we have so little 
missionary feeling about us, and are so unconcerned whe- 
ther sinners are converted, or whether men love God or 
not. It is quite impossible for true love to co-exist with an 
unmissionary spirit. 

But we all of us have times when we love God more than 
usual, times of fervor, of closer union with Him, of mo- 
mentary love of suffering, transitory flashes of things which 
are like the phenomena of the saints. They neither last 
long enough nor come often enough to form our normal 
state. They are simply our best times. Now we need not 
dwell either upon their rarity or their brevity ; but we 
would fain ask if even then we love God altogether with- 
out reserves. Is nothing kept back from Him? Is our 
renunciation of self ample and faultless? Have we no 
secret corner of our hearts, where some favorite weakness 
lurks in the shade, and which the strong light of heavenly 
love has not blinded to its own interests ? I am afraid to 
go on with the picture, lest I should have to ask myself, at 
last. What is left of the Christian life ? But we have seen 
enough to confess, of our love of God, that not only is what 
we give very little, but that even that little is given in the 
most ungraceful and unlovelike of ways. Surely this is a 
confession not to be made by words, which are not equal 
to the task, but only by silent tears, while we lie prostrate 
before the Throne of Him, whom, strange to say, we really 
do love most tenderly, even while we slight Him ! 

On all sides of us there are mysteries. Our relations to 
God are full of them. Our coldness and His love. His for- 
bearance and our petulance, — we hardly know which is the 
most strange, the most inexplicable. If we consider atten- 
^tively how little we love God, and in what way we show it, 
honesty will compel us to acknowledge that we men should 
not accept such service at each other's hands. We should 
reject it with scorn. We should regard it as an injury 
rather than as a service. A father would disinherit his 



238 OUR xiCTUAL LOVE OF GOD. 

son ; a friend would put away from him the friend of his 
bosom, if his love w^ere requited as we requite the love of 
our Heavenly Father. Yet it is the ever-blessed God, who 
is what He is, to whom we, being what we are, dare to 
offer this mockery of w^orship. Will He open heaven, and 
oast His fiery bolts upon us, and annihilate us for ever, 
that we may be no longer a dishonor to His beautiful 
creation ? Or wall He turn from our proffered service with 
anger, or at least wnth a contemptuous indifference? We 
cannot easily understand how it is that He does not. Yet 
on the contrary He vouchsafes to accept and reward our 
pitiful affection. And His very rewards and blessings 
lead us astray ; for we begin to put a price upon our 
merits, according to the greatness of His recompense, not 
according to the reality of their lowness; and we think we 
have treated Him with great generosity, and that His re- 
ward is to us only the proof of our generosity ; while on 
the contrary we consider Him to be asking very much of 
us ; and our minds do not see His rights, and our hearts do 
not feel them. And God sees all this, and He makes no 
sign. It is not so much as if He seemed insensible to our in- 
gratitude ; it is rather as if He did not see that it was in- 
gratitude at all. No love can be conceived more sensitive 
than that of Him who has eternally predestinated, and 
then called out of nothing, the objects of His choice and 
predilection. Yet God does not seem to feel our coldness 
and perversity. Rather He appears to prize what we give 
Him, and to rejoice in its possession. He wished it other- 
wise. He made very different terms at the outset. He 
asked for far more than He has got. But He makes no 
complaint ; and not being able to have His terms allowed, 
He takes us on our own. 

Is it possible that it can be God of whom we are daring 
thus to speak ? why do not all we. His children, league 
together to make it up to Him ? angels of heaven? why 
is your worship of that Blessed Majesty aught else but tears ? 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 239 



CHAPTER V 

IN "WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

Signore, yolete dare per quello, che facciamo per voi, piu di quello clae 
potete fare ; e non potendo Toi fare Toi medesimo, restate solamente 
soddisfatto con dare voi medesimo : stupendo caso 1 che il Creatore non 
ritrovi in tutta la sua onnipotenza, cosa, che possa fare in aggradimento 
di qualsivoglia cosa, che fa un giusto per suo amore. Niereinberg. 

AYhen angels offer the prayers of men with incense in 
their golden thuribles, there are none which rise up before 
the throne of God with a sweeter or more acceptable fra- 
grance than the murmurs and complaints of loving souls, 
because God is not loved sufficiently. Everywhere on 
earth, where the true love of God is to be found, there is 
also this peaceful and blessed unhappiness along with it. 
In many a cloister, by the sea shore, or on the mountain 
top, in the still forest or the crowded city, there are many 
who in the retirement of their cell, or before the Blessed 
Sacrament, are sighing with the sweet grief of love, because 
men love God so coldly and so unworthily. There are 
many amid the distractions of the world, and who appear 
to be walking only in its ways, who have no heavier 
weight upon their hearts than the neglect, abandonment, 
and unrequited love of God. Through the long cold night, 
or during the noisy day, incessantly as from a tranquil 
holy purgatory, the sounds of this plaintive sorrow, this 
blessedly unhappy love, rise up into the ear of God. Some 
tremble with horror of the sins which are daily committed 
against His holy law. Some are saddened because those 



240 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

who by their faith know God so well, love Him with such 
carelessness and pusillanimity. Some, who are wont to 
make His resplendent attributes the objects of their daily 
contemplation, murmur because they see nowhere on the 
earth, not even among the saints, anything worthy to be 
called love of so great and infinite a goodness. Others 
with meek petulance expostulate with God, because He 
hides Himself, and does not constrain souls to love Him by 
open manifestations of His surpassing beauty: while others 
mourn over their own cold hearts, and pine to love God 
better than they do. There are even innocent children 
who weep because they feel, what as yet they can hardly 
know, that men are leaving so cruelly unrequited the 
burning love of God. All these sighs and tears, all these 
complaints and expostulations, all this heavy-hearted 
silence and wounded bleeding love, — all is rising up 
hourly to the Majesty on high, not unmingled with the 
sharper sounds of active penance and expiatory mortifica- 
tions. It is at once intercession and thanksgiving and 
petition and satisfaction, and our Heavenly Father loves 
the sweet violence which this beautiful sorrow is doing to 
Him. 

Meanwhile God Himself vouchsafes to appear contented, 
and even more than contented with the poverty of our 
love. He seems to be satisfied with that in us, which is 
very far from satisfying ourselves. Whether it is that 
His clear view of our exceeding nothingness stimulates 
His compassion to make allowances for us which we have 
no right to make for ourselves, or whether to the incom- 
prehensible affection of a Creator there is some inestimable 
value in the least and lowest offering of the creature's love, 
so it is, that His magnificence repays our love with rewards 
of the most overwhelming grandeur, while at the same time 
His justice and wisdom contrive that these immense rewards 
should be in exact and varying proportion with our merits. He 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 241 

alone seems to be above the feeling of that which His ser- 
vants feel so deeply, their own coldness and ingratitude to 
Him. Yet we know that none can measure so unerringly 
the hatefulness of our iniquity ; none can estimate so truly 
the glorious abundance of strong celestial grace which is 
hourly conferred upon us ; none can know Him as He 
knows Himself, and therefore none can abhor sin as He 
abhors it, or comprehend, as He comprehends it, the insult 
of our lukewarm love. Does it not even come to ourselves 
sometimes in prayer, when we have been dwelling long 
upon some one beautiful attribute of the Divine Nature, 
to ask ourselves in amazement, how it is that God can pos- 
sibly forgive sin, and forgiving it, can look so completely 
as if He had forgotten it as well, and even seem to esteem 
us more when we rise from a shameful fall, than if we had 
stood upright in His grace and our integrity all the while ? 
And yet our best notions of God are unspeakably unworthy 
of Him. When we get views of His perfections which 
thrill through us like a new life, and throw open to our 
minds grand vast worlds of truth and wonder, these rays 
of light are full of dust and dimness, and do not approach 
to the real beauty of the Creator. Thus it is that we can- 
not take a step in this land of divine love, but mysteries 
start up around us far more hard to solve than the deepest 
difficulties of scholastic theology. We are getting new 
graces every day, crowning our correspondence to the grace 
we had before. We are continually drinking fresh draughts 
of immortal life in the Sacraments which we are allowed 
to repeat and renew day after day. But we are so accus- 
tomed to all this, that we can scarcely realize the miracles 
of compassion and love, of which we are incessantly the 
objects. All this continuance of grace is a manifestation 
to us of God's contentment with us. Not that He would 
not have us better than we are, and is not always stimula- 
ting us to higher things. But He takes gladly what we let 
16 V 



242 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

Him have ; and with loving eagerness, not only furnishes 
us with instant means to serve Him better, but ahnost an- 
ticipates with His rewards our little services. For the 
recompense full often comes before the deed, and as our 
good works are not sufficiently numerous to gratify His 
liberality. He is crowning all day long a thousand good in- 
tentions which He knows will never issue in results. And 
why ? because it is not so much works, as love, for which 
He craves. the mj'stery of the Divine Kecompenses ! 
how is it to be unriddled except by the satisfaction of the 
Precious Blood of Jesus? And then how is that adorable 
Blood-shedding itself to be unriddled ? If the mystery of 
a Contented God, with His blessed wrath appeased and His 
all-holy justice satisfied, can only be explained by the Cross 
of the Incarnate Word, it is only removing the difficulty 
one step backward ; for then by what is the Cross itself to 
be explained ? Are we not for ever obliged to take refuge 
in Creation as the grand primal act of love, the fountain- 
head of all the divine compassions, and to acknowledge 
that the classes of mysteries, which of all others are the 
most unfathomable, are those which concern the nature, 
the degree, and the perfections of Creative Love ? beau- 
tiful Abysses, in which it is so sweet to lose ourselves, so 
blissful to go on sounding them to all eternity and never 
learn the depths, and in musing upon whose precipitous 
shores a loving heart finds heaven even while on earth ! It 
is a day to date from, when we first come to see, that the 
very fact of God having created us is in itself a whole 
magnificent revelation of eternal love, more safe to lean 
upon than what we behold, more worthy of our trust than 
what we know, more utterly our own than any other pos- 
session we can have. 

But let us study in detail the way in which God repays 
that poor and fitful and ungenerous love of which we our- 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 243 

selves are more than half ashamed. Let us enquire when 
He repays us, with what He repays us, and in what man- 
ner He repays us. We shall find fresh motives of love at 
every step in the enquiry. 

First of all, when does He repay us ? He does not keep 
us waiting for our recompenses. AYe know well that one 
additional degree of sanctifying grace is of more price than 
all the magnificence of the universe. The objects upon which 
we often fasten our affections or employ our ambition, dur- 
ing long years of concentrated vigilance and persevering 
toil, are less worthy of our endeavors and less precious in 
the possession, than one single particle of sanctifying 
grace. Yet, let us suppose that a momentary tem.ptation 
has assailed us, and we have resisted it, or that we have 
lifted up our hearts for an instant in faith and love to God, 
or that for the sake of Christ we have done some trifling 
unselfish thing, scarcely has the action escaped us before 
then and instantly the heavens have opened invisibly, and 
the force of heaven, the participation of the Divine Nature, 
the beauty, power, and marvel of sanctifying grace, has 
passed in viewless flight and with insensible ingress into 
our soul. There is not the delay of one instant. More- 
over these ingresses of grace are beyond number, and yet, 
if we correspond and persevere, the influence and result 
of each one of them is simply eternal. Each additional 
degree of sanctifying grace represents and secures an ad- 
ditional degree of glory in heaven, if only we correspond 
thereto, and persevere unto the end. At the moment in 
which we receive each additional degree of sanctifying 
grace our soul is clothed before God in a new and glorious 
beauty which a moment ago it had not got. 

The communication of sanctifying grace to the soul is 
itself a marvellous and mysterious disclosure of the divine 
magnificence and liberality. It is assuredly most probable, 



244 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOYE. 

if it is not certain,"^ that each additional degree of sancti- 
fying grace is given the very instant it is merited by our 
actions, and is not reserved as an accumulated reward to 
be bestowed upon us when we enter into glory. But each 
additional degree of sanctifying grace is not a mere enrich- 
ing of us with the created gifts of God, but it is a real and 
new mission to our souls of the Second and Third Persons 
of the Most Holy Trinity, together with the unsent coming 
to us and dwelling with us of the Father Himself. It is 
not only that the Three Divine Persons are always in us 
by essence, presence, and power ; but by sanctifying grace 
They are in us in a new and special and most real, though 
deeply mysterious way, and in the case of the particular 
graces of the sacraments. They are with us for particular 
ends, effects, and purposes. By an invisible mission this 
real indwelling of the Divine Persons assumes a new mode 
of existence at every one of the multitudinous additions and 
degrees of sanctifying grace, a new mode of existence which 
it is hardly possible to explain in words, as on the one hand 
it implies no manner of change or motion in Them, while 
on the other there is from Them some contact with the soul 
more personal, more intimate, more real, than that which 
existed but a moment before. If we are to allow some 
theologians to say that where the gifts of grace more 
concern the intellect, there is a mission of the Son, and, 
where they more concern the will, a mission of the Holy 
Ghost, yet we cannot hold any mission of the Son which is 
not also a mission of the Holy Ghost, nor any mission of 
the Holy Ghost which is not also a mission of the Son, 
nor any mission of the Two, apart and separate from the 
coming and indwelling of the Father. If it is hard to 

* Of Suarez de Beatitudine, Disp. yi. Sect. i. n. 13. Also De Gratia, lib. ix. 
cap. iii. 23. Dico ergo gradus omnes gratiae, quos Justus per a-ctus remissos 
obaritatis meretur, statim sine uUa dilatione. nullave spectata dispositione, 
illi conferri, ac provide justum non solum per omnes hos actus mereri, sed 
etiam statim consequi suae gratia^ augmentum. But it is a question. 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 245 

understand this, it is also extremely beautiful, and ought 
to fill us with fresh love of God, and a more loving 
wonder at His bounty towards His creatures. This doc- 
trine of divine mission with each degree of sanctifying 
grace shows us how sanctifying grace is a substantial 
and real anticipation of heaven, that even now it is Himself, 
and not His created gifts only, that God gives to us, and 
that He is our own God, our own possession, from the very 
first moment of our justification. Moreover there is some- 
thing to overawe us with the sense of the divine intimacy 
with us, and to make us glow with love even in our awe, 
to reflect that this inexplicable operation, this celestial man- 
sion, in our souls, this new and ever new mission of the 
Divine Persons, which we cannot explain and can only 
dimly apprehend, is actually being reflected in us many, 
many times a day, while we are in a state of grace, and 
seeking in our actions the glory and the will of God."^ Nay, 
so substantially are the Divine Persons present to the soul 
by Their invisible mission, that if by impossibility they 
were not present to us by Their immensity, They would be 
so by reason of sanctifying grace. f 

* Billuart de Trinitat, vi. 4. 

f There is no province of theology where language proves itself less ade- 
quate to the task of expressing doctrine, than that which concerns the rela- 
tion of the Divine Persons to created things. For on the one hand theology- 
is clear as to the reality of such relations, and on the other hand it is equally 
clear as to the axiom that the external works of the Holy Trinity are indivis- 
ible. There is a beauty, which we can only half see, about these relations, 
which to judge from the explanations of theologians, baffles words, or as 
soon as it is put into words seems dangerous to dogma. See Schwetz. Theol. 
Dogma, i. 361. The following passage from S. Cyril, of Alexandria, is the more 
remnrkable as coming from a post-Nicene father : — 

Kui EUTL fxev KaO' VTroaraGiv lSiKi)i> rroXvTiXcios b -arrip, b[i6io}s ^£ Kal b 
vibSf Kal TO TTvevfia' aXA' fj fvog tGjv wvofxacixivodv SrjfjiovpyiK^ dtXrjai^, i<p* 
oTf^t Kcp uv XiyoiTO ysviadai rvxbv hvipyijua /Jifv uvtov, ttX^v Sia Trdarjg 
£p')^£TaL Tiis OcoTTjTog, Kal Trjg vnep ktIgiv IgtIv ovciag a-noTtXtcixaf howov 
[ilv (oGTrip Tiy n\r}v Kal iSiKois hdaTc^ ■npoauin'f) -npinov, us ^<a r/3(wy 

v2 



246 IN AVHAT WAY GOD KEPxVYS OUR LOVE. 

Moreover all through life our mere preservation of the 
gift of faith entitles us always to have the grace of God at 
hand when it is wanted, preventing and anticipating the 
rapid and subtle movements of our spiritual enemies ; and 
even when it is not especially wanted, because we are not 
under the pressure of circumstances or in critical occasions, 
it is most likely that we are always insensibly receiving 
grace, except when we sleep ; so that we live in a world of 
grace, and breathe its atmosphere unconsciously, thinking 
as little of it as of the air we breathe in order to support 
our natural life. The Creator is as it were bound to assist 
His puny creatures : but He is not bound, unless by the 
excess of His own goodness, to be always near us, in the 
Christian sense of His being nigh unto all them who call 
upon Him. This nearness is His present and instantaneous 
reward for our unworthy service of Him. Joy and sorrow 
have, each of them, their own wants and trials and peculiar 
laws ; and who has not experienced the ready goodness of 
Grod in both of them ? Life and earth and the world abound 
with joy, even to running over. Happiness sweeps the 
whole earth with its gay illuminations, just as the strong 
ewift sunshine throws its unimpeded mantle over hill and 
dale, and land and sea. We are too happy. Our happi- 
ness runs away with us. Its superabundance will hardly 
let us sober ourselves, or steady our views of this transitory 
world. Joys are thousandfold ; we cannot count them ; 
their name is legion ; we can hardly class them by their 
kinds. They run out from beneath the throne of God, and 
electrify millions of souls the world over at the same moment. 
Our very life is joy, if we will only be honest enough to 

hrToaTdcriwv irptrroi uv Kal l6LKU)g kKdarr]^ iTo\vTc\ii(»)s exo'^<^JlKci&* iuvr/jv. 
Ivspyh TOiyapovv 6 rrarripy dWd SI viov ev TTvivfxari, ivepyii Kal b vtog, 
aAX' w? Svvajxis rov narpog, f| avrov te Kal ev avTui voovpievog Kad' vwap^iv 
UiKnv' evipyti Kal to jrvtvi-uif nv^vfia yap earl too Trarpds, Kac rev viov, to 
rroXvTTovpyiKdv, — S. Cyrilli Alexandr. de S. Trinity dialog, vi. 



IN AVIIAT WAY GOD llErAYS OUR LOVE. Z4 / 

acknowledge it to God and to ourselves. The unhappiest 
man on earth has from sunrise to sunset more satisfaction 
than unhappiness. It is seldom he would even give up his 
own self and take another, still less forfeit the pleasure of 
living altogether. What a Creator must ours be, in whose 
world merely to live is a stronger joy than any misery, 
however unparalleled, which can befall us ! And how 
marvellously God multiplies His graces upon us in our joy, 
opening our hearts to love Him more generously, enlight- 
ening our minds to see Him more clearly, quickening our 
gratitude, giving us a surprising elasticity in our spiritual 
exercises, and taking away the dangerous alluring beauty 
of earth^s idols by the very strength of the gladsome, dis- 
enchanting light which He throws upon them. But, above 
all, in joy we full often receive a double portion of that dear 
grace, which is well-nigh all our salvation, the grace of true 
contrition ; for there is no contrition, which, for strength, 
vividness, and endurance, is like the contrition of a joyous 
man. 

Sorrow too, when borne even with ordinary patience, has 
its own rewards from God at once, rewards both of nature 
and of grace. What can be more beautiful than the way 
in which He calculates our weakness, and then measures 
out our sorrows, and then rains vehement storms of grace 
upon our fainting wills ! But we only see this now and then, 
and in dusty indistinct perspective. In eternity we shall 
behold our past life in God, and what a thrilling revelation 
it will be ! But is not this undeniably true of ourselves, so 
far as we have gone in life, that we have had far less sor- 
row and pain than we are quite conscious we could bear, 
that our powers of bearing have been sensibly augmented 
w^hile the cross was on us, that we can lookback upon chap- 
ters of our past life about which we distinctly feel that with 
our present grace we could not live them over again, that 
the fruits of sorrow have always been tenfold brighter in 



248 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

the issue than the darkness was ever deepened in the pro- 
cess, and finally that in the retrospect the very sorrows 
themselves have been full of joys, exotic joys whose large 
leaves and waxen blossoms and long-lasting perfumes show 
that they were grown in heaven and not on earth ? Yet 
these are only the present rewards of grief, the earthly 
blessings of those who mourn 1 But look into the wonder- 
ful faces of those rings of saints who encompass the throne 
on high ; feed your soul on the grave intellectual beauty 
which is depicted there, the winning look of blameless 
purity, the impassioned intensity of their celestial love. 
With most of them it was sorrow that chastened them into 
that transcendent loveliness, sorrow that piloted them to 
that happy shore, sorrow that put those jewelled crowns 
upon their heads, sorrow, keen and deep and long, that 
unveiled for them the ever-beaming countenance of God ! 
magnificent Creator ! where hast Thou left room for our 
disinterested love, when everywhere it seems as though 
Thou hadst made our interests take precedence of Thine 
own ? 

Look at death, which is a simple punishment ! Can a 
created intelligence conceive of anything more terrible 
than to fall into the hands of God for the single solitary 
purpose of being punished ? And we might have thought 
that death would be like this, being the first-born child of 
sin, from which not even the Immaculate Mother might be 
exempt. Yet how should we have miscalculated the love 
of God ! The deaths of His servants are among the most 
valued jewels of His crown. They are among the best pos- 
sessions which He holds in right of His creative love. We 
know but little of the sights and sounds, the tastes and 
touches, of that last dark passage. There is a shroud of 
seeming dishonor as well as mystery thrown around that 
dread event. But we know that in it men live whole lives 
in one short hour, and accumulate experiences which pass 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 249 

our understanding both for number, rapidity and truth. 
We know that grand act has peculiar needs, peculiar dis- 
tresses, and that the invisible and visible world forget their 
boundaries at the death-bed, and war together in dread con- 
flict, of which for the most part the dying eye is the sole 
spectator. If we think long on death, we shalj come 
to wonder how it is that any one can die calmly ; the inter- 
ests at stake are so terrific, the moment so decisive, the 
horrors so thickly strewn, the natural helplessness so com- 
plete. A whole world is sensibly sinking and giving way 
under us, and there is nothing but blackness, space, and 
the arms of God. Who can dare to fall through without a 
shudder ? Yet when are God^s graces and indulgences 
more numerous, more triumphant, more accessible, than in 
that dreadful hour? Grace makes a very sunset of what to 
nature is the most impenetrable darkness, and the plaintive 
strains of the Miserere merge in spite of our humility into 
songs of triumph ; for the walls between the dying soul and 
the heavenly Jerusalem are so nearly fretted through, that 
the loud alleluias mingle with and distract the contrite love 
whose eyes are closing on the Crucifix. The creature's 
change is very dear to the Creator. Precious in the sight 
of the Lord are the deaths of His Saints. Listen to this 
beautiful story from the revelations of St. Gertrude. She 
heard the preacher in a sermon urge most strongly the 
absolute obligation of dying persons to love God supremely 
and to repent of their sins with true contrition founded on 
the motive of love. She thought it a hard saying, and ex- 
aggeratedly stated, and she murmured within herself that 
if so pure a love were needed, few indeed died well, and a 
cloud came over her mind as she thought of this. But God 
Himself vouchsafed to speak to her, and dispel her trouble. 
He said that in that last conflict, if the dying were persons 
who had ever tried to please Him and to live good lives, 
He disclosed Himself to them as so infinitely beautiful and 



250 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

desirable, that love of Him penetrated into the innermost 
recesses of their souls, so that they made acts of true con- 
trition from the very force of their love of Him : which pro- 
pension of Mine, He vouchsafed to add, thus to visit them 
in that moment of death, I wish My elect to know, and I 
desire it to be preached and proclaimed that among My 
other mercies this also may have a special place in men's 
remembrance.^ Let us then tell each other this sweet doc- 
trine, that our hearts may burn more and more with love 
of so compassionate a God. 

Now all these are present rewards, ways in which God 
repays on earth our love of Him. They are but samples 
of what is incessant, abundant, superfluous, all through 
life. Every one^s mercies are so great that they are, to him 
at least, rightly viewed, strange, wonderful, and unexpected. 
God tries our faith, and seems to delight in trying it, by 
the very reduplication of His benefits. But after all, this 
life is not the time of His recompenses. He does not pro- 
fess to give us our wages here. He warns us not to expect 
them. Is it then that His love is so great, that He cannot 
help Himself, and that his Nature is under the blessed ne- 
cessity of loving and of giving? Or is it that these mercies 
are only the casual drops which are spilled from the over- 
flowing cup prepared for us in heaven ? Oh ! even the most 
desolate of men may be so sure of his His paternal love, 
that they may remember that eternity can be no long way 
off, and will repay the waiting. 

But if the promptitude of His payment is in itself a proof 
of the greatness of God's love, still more strongly is that 
consoling fact brought out when we consider with what He 
pays us. The blessings of nature, the gifts of grace, the 
rewards of glory, — who is sufficient to declare the number, 
the beauty, the greatness, and the wonder of these things ? 

*Ap. Pennequin. Isagoge ad Amorem Divinuni; p. 43. 



IN WHAT AVAY GOD llEPAYS OUR LOVE. 25] 

There are three vast kingdoms, three magnificent creations, 
for so they might be called, which are simple expressions 
of the vastness of the Creators love. They cannot enrich 
Him. They are not needed to His bliss. They add nothing 
to what He possessed already. His mercy contrives to reap 
some little harvest of accidental glory from them, but it is 
at the expense of endless outrage, not only of His justice, 
but even to His compassion. They are the product of His 
love of the creature, our property rather than His, almost 
more our dominion even than His own. 

In the kingdom of nature there are three vast provinces 
or separate worlds, which are full of the most exquisite en- 
joyment to the creature, and we speak only of enjoy- 
ments, which, if through our frailty they are dangerous 
as stealing our hearts from God, are yet altogether without 
reproach of sin. The physical world is full of God^s re- 
wards. Life is itself a joy. But what shall we say of the 
abounding sense of health and vigor, which they who en- 
joy it the most abundantly can hardly value at its legiti- 
mate price ? Yet to one, whose head is always aching, 
whose limbs have always in them some lurking pain, and 
whose languor and feebleness is all day long playing the 
traitor to the activity of his mind or the energy of his will, 
the sense of health, when it comes, is almost like a miracle. 
There is the surpassing beauty of scenery, the grandeur of 
the mountains, the sublimity of the sea, the variety of fer- 
tile landscape, the rain, the wind, the sunshine, and the 
storm. Every sense is an avenue of perpetual pleasure, 
which, if we will, can raise the mind to God, and inflame 
our hearts with love. If we except the irregularities which 
sin has introduced into the physical world, and which 
manifestly form no part of the system, the whole of it is 
simple pleasure and enjoyment, an emanation from the 
everlasting and inexhaustible gladness of the Most High. 

But the pleasures of the intellectual world are yet more 
wonderful. Can any pleasure be more exquisite than th« 
sensible exercise of our mental faculties ? The variety, the 



252 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPxlYS OUR LOVE. 

multitude, the depth, the rapidity, the interweaving of our 
thoughts, are full of boundless enjoyment, leading us 
through realms and realms of truth and beauty, and 
charming us at every turn with some enchanting disco- 
very. Through some minds the pure delight of poetry 
thrills, with feelings of the most indescribable nature. 
With others, the sweet, skilful strains of music wind into 
the uttermost recesses of their souls, with a beauty which 
is sometimes so gifted, as almost to win back the reason 
that has already deserted its throne. To others, form and 
color, painting, statuary, and architecture, are like copious 
fountains of power and enjoyment, streaming into them 
abundantly forever. With many, the labor of composition 
is only a pain because of the very excess of the pleasure, 
which is more than they can bear. The investigation of 
truth is only at times weary and irksome, because our 
tyrant minds are demanding of the body what it cannot 
give. No more can be said of the pleasures of the intel- 
lectual world, than that they are marvellous shadows of the 
incomprehensible jo3^s of God Himself. 

If the moral world seems to afford a less variety of 
enjoyment than the intellectual, it far transcends it in the 
vividness and power of its enjoyments. The will is an 
inexhaustible mine of joys, which our nature seems to 
prize beyond all others. Our affections are complicated 
instruments of the most amazing and unexpected and 
diversified pleasures, which possess our whole nature, and 
fulfil it with satisfaction, in a way which no other plea- 
sures do. Human love sits upon a throne above all other 
human joys, and there is no one who ever dreams of ques- 
tioning its rights or of abating its prerogatives. Indeed, 
the joy of love is too great for life. It breaks its bounds, 
runs riot, and makes wild work even with the strong frame- 
work of society and the destiny of kingdoms. It fills every 
depth in our nature and then runs over, deluging mind and 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 253 

will, duty and even passion. There is no abyss sufficiently 
capacious to hold the torrents of love which one heart is 
able to outpour, except that sea without horizon, bed, or 
shore, the ever-blessed Being of God Himself. The Holy 
Ghost, the eternally proceeding Spirit, is the jubilee of the 
Father and the Son ; and His shadow lies forevermore 
upon the moral world, the vast reflecting waters of the 
human will. As the physical world, with its joys of sub- 
stance and being, appears to be a transcript of the Person 
of the Eternal Father, and the intellectual world, with its 
light and laws, to be an illuminated shadow of the Person 
of the Word, so does the moral world, the fiery, thrilling 
world of love and will, represent Him who is the co-equal 
limit of the Godhead, the third Person of the Ever-blessed 
Trinity. 

And yet these three worlds, the physical, the intellectual, 
and the moral, are one world ; and in their unions, bl end- 
ings, borrowings, comparisons, and intersections, we have 
so many fresh sources of the most delightful enjoyment, 
above and beyond those which these worlds furnish in their 
separate capacities. Oh ! why do we not worship more 
constantly and more intelligently, in common daily things, 
the wisdom of God, thus lending itself to the strong will 
of His goodness, in every department of creation. Every 
orb in the immeasurable fields of indistinguishable star- 
dust, lies in the light of God's outpoured and overflowing 
joy. Every created intelligence drinks its fill of the foun- 
tains of His gladness. Every instinct of animals beats 
with a pulsation of divine enjoyment. Every tree uplifts 
its head and flings out its branches, every flower blooms 
and sheds sweet odor, every mineral glances and sparkles, 
just as the clouds sail, and the waters flow, and the planet 
turns, in the excess of the happiness of God. His blessed- 
ness lies over the whole world, serenely shining, like the 
waters of a spiritual sea, beneath whose transparent depths 



254 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUTt LOVE. 

all creation with beautiful distinctness lies. Thus, in God's 
wide world, there is no room for sin, no provision for sor- 
row, not a corner for unhappiness. Sin is a stranger, an 
intruder, an enemy, as little at home on earth as it would 
be in heaven. It is we who have introduced it into the 
bright and happy world, we who, by the freedom of our 
wills, which were left at large that we might love God the 
more magnificently, have broken down the cloister of His 
Paradise. 

It is not altogether man's ingratitude which makes him 
forgetful of the benefits of God. He Himself, blessed be 
His Holy Name ! throws His own mercies into the shade, 
as well by multiplying them beyond our powers of count- 
ing, as by surpassing and excelling them by others. Thus 
it is with the kingdom of nature. It is lost in the splendor 
of the kingdom of grace. Awhile ago, it looked so bright 
and beautiful, with all its features so smiling and its out- 
lines so soft and etherial, and now, like a mountain side 
which the sunbeams have deserted, it looks cold and bare, 
rugged and uninviting. We have already seen how, in the 
kingdom of grace, God rewards our efibrts instantaneously, 
by fresh supplies of greater grace. Let us look for a mo- 
ment at grace itself. The gulf between God and ourselves 
seems infinite and impassable ; yet grace bridges it over, 
and passes it with a rapidity to which the speed of the 
electric spark is weary slowness. By sanctifying grace He 
is incessantly, habitually, powerfully, superabundantly, 
pouring into us marvellous communications of His Divine 
Nature. Each undulation of it, as it reaches and informs 
our souls, is a greater miracle than the creation of the 
universe. One touch, and we pass from darkness to 
light; one touch, and all our eternity is changed. He 
endows our souls, even before reason dawns, with myste- 
rious infused habits, which make such utterly new crea- 
tures of us, that the process can only be described as a 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 255 

being positively born again. Besides this, He plants, even 
in the unconscious infant at the font, seven wonderful gifts 
of the Holy Ghost, seven distinct heavens of the most 
beautiful splendors and unearthly powers, in which lie 
hid the possibilities of the very highest sanctity. Thus 
our souls are made, as it were, a musical instrument, 
worthy that the hands of God should play upon it, and 
out of which He can evoke such melodies of holiness, 
such strains of the exquisite music of perfection, as could 
ravish the angels of heaven, even as the Human Soul of 
Jesus is ravishing them this hour. Neither is this instru- 
ment to remain unused. The impulses of the Divine Will, 
the pressure of actual grace, is ever varying the music 
which they draw forth, as the rapid touch of the Creator^s 
hand flies over the many keys of the complex heart of 
man; and all the while one grace is leading to another in 
wonderful progression, one the prophecy of what is yet to 
come, and another the crown of what has gone before, 
with such a vista of graces in the prospect that no man 
ever reaches to the term. The day will never dawn when 
he must not aspire to more and more ; there is no term 
which is the limit of the grace which God intended him to 
reach ; and, however long it may be delayed, death will 
find him full of beginnings, laying the foundations of a new 
and better, a more lofty and spacious, fabric than he had 
built before. Most wonderful too is it to behold how all 
this grace elicits and magnifies the freedom of the will, 
and, while it supports and strengthens and almost con- 
strains it, makes it all the while more undeniably, because 
more spiritually, free. 

The abundance of grace, again, is almost as wonderful 
as its nature. We live in an ocean of grace, as fishes live 
in the deep sea. It is above, beneath, around us, every- 
vrhere and overwhelmingly. It comes in floods, which 
though they have sudden rises at times, are always floods? 



253 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOYE. 

and know no ebb or intermission. Its continuity is 
another marvel which we must add to its abundance. The 
want of duly reflecting upon this is one cause of the pusil- 
lanimity which is so common in the spiritual life. Men 
too often think practically that grace is like the theatrical 
god of the heathen poet, and does not interfere until it is 
wanted, and wanted with such obvious urgency as to 
justify even to an unsupernatural apprehension some 
heavenly interference. This inadequate conception of the 
incessant action of grace at once diminishes their confidence 
in God, unnerves them in temptations, deters them from 
attempting generous enterprises, and makes them estimate 
far too cheaply their responsibilities, privileges, and possi- 
bilities. It cannot be too often repeated that the wakeful 
reason breathes grace, and lives in its light, and leans on 
its support, as much as we breathe the air and see by the 
daylight and have the hard safe crust of the planet 
beneath our feet. The extent and universality of grace, in 
the sacraments and out of them, in the Church and in 
order to the Church, the way in which it can combine with 
so much that is false and evil, and its godlike importunity, 
the very thought of which is a kind of prevision of our 
final perseverance, — all these characteristics of grace 
would fill volumes, were they treated of at length. Its 
variety too must not be forgotten. If the saints have 
graces which we hardly know how to name and classify, 
if no one man^s grace is like another's, what must we 
think of the wide-spreading realms of angelical existence, 
and the seemingly fabulous arithmetic of graces which we 
must believe there is among those clear far-reaching 
spirits? Surely if it is not hard for a man to live in the 
pure bright air of heaven, and some shock of disease or 
outward accident must supervene, to cut short the thread 
of his existence, so it cannot be hard in this fresh, buoyant, 
bracing atmosphere of grace for a man to save his soul, 



I 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 257 

and it must be some danger which he himself has sought, 
or some poison which he has wilfully imbibed, and after 
that pertinaciously refused the antidote, which can destroy 
his soul, and even then with difficulty. A man must 
struggle to be out of grace, when grace is so around him. 
We believe that in all things man's will is free, but that in 
nothing is he less free than to be lost eternally. 

But all these blessings of nature and of grace are only 
in an imperfect and improper sense the rewards of the 
Creator. The kingdom of glory is the theatre of His re- 
compense. It is in order to extend that kingdom, that the 
grace given us is so ineffably beyond what is due to our 
nature. But how shall we hope to measure the kingdom 
of glory, when it is to be measured only by the Divine 
Magnificence? Both a prophet and an apostle join in 
teaching us that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor man's 
heart conceived, what God has prepared for them that 
love Him. When the bodies of the just rise at the general 
resurrection, with their senses spiritualized and rendered 
capable of pleasures which do not fall within their pro- 
vince now, and with perhaps many new senses developed 
in the immortal body, which were unknown in its mortal 
days, the pure pleasures of these glorified senses must be 
something quite beyond the power of our imagination to 
picture to itself. He who knows the blameless exultation 
of his soul when the eye has conveyed to it a landscape of 
surpassing beauty, or whose ear has thrilled with some in- 
spiriting or subduing strain of music, or who, when he 
heard a passage of magnificent poetry, felt as if an imme- 
diate and extraordinary accession of bold intellectual 
power was given to him as he listened, may at least indis- 
tinctly guess the exquisite delights of the glorified senses 
of the risen body, or which is perhaps more true, under- 
stand how their delicacy and charm must be beyond our 
power of guessing. 

17 w2 



258 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

Yet the heavenly joys of the illuminated understanding 
far transcend the thrills of the glorified senses. The con- 
templation of heavenly beauty and of heavenly truth must 
indeed be beyond all our earthly standards of comparison. 
The clearness and instantaneousness of all the mental pro- 
cesses, the complete exclusion of error, the unbroken 
serenity of the vision, the facility of embracing whole 
worlds and systems in one calm, searching, exhausting 
glance, the divine character and utter holiness of all the 
truths presented to the view, — these are broken words 
which serve at least to show what we may even now indis- 
tinctly covet in that bright abode of everlasting bliss. In- 
telligent intercourse with the angelic choirs, and the in- 
cessant transmission of the divine splendors through them 
to our minds, cannot be thought of without our perceiving 
that the keen pleasures and deep sensibilities of the intel- 
lectual world on earth are but poor, thin, unsubstantial 
shadows of the exulting immortal life of our glorified 
minds above. 

The very expansion of the faculties of the soul, and the 
probable disclosure in it of many new faculties which have 
no object of exercise in this land of exile, are in themselves 
pleasures which we can hardly picture to ourselves. To bo 
rescued from all narrowness, and for ever ; to possess at all 
times a perfect consciousness of our whole undying selves, 
and to possess and retain that self-consciousness in the 
bright light of God ; to feel the supernatural corroborations 
of the light of glory, securing to us powers of contem- 
plation such as the highest mystical theology can only 
faintly and feebly imitate ; to expatiate in God, delivered 
from the monotony of human things; to be securely 
poised in the highest flights of our immense capacities, 
without any sense of weariness, or any chance of a re- 
action ; who can think out for himself the realities of a 
life like this ? 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 259 

Yet what is all this compared with one hour, one of 
earth^s short hours, of the magnificences of celestial love? 
0! to turn our whole souls upon God, and souls thus ex- 
panded and thus glorified ; to have our afi*ections multiplied 
and magnified a thousand fold, and then girded up and 
strengthened by immortality to bear the beauty of God to 
be unveiled before us ; and even so strengthened, to be rapt 
by it into a sublime amazement which has no similitude on 
earth ; to be carried away by the inebriating torrents of 
love, and yet be firm in the most steadfast adoration ; to 
have passionate desire, yet without tumult or disturbance; 
to have the most bewildering intensity along with an un- 
earthly calmness ; to lose ourselves in God, and then find 
ourselves there more our own than ever; to love rapturously 
and to be loved again still more rapturously, and then for 
our love to grow more rapturous still, and again the return 
of our love to be still outstripping what we gave, and then 
for us to love even yet more and more and more rapturously, 
and again, and again, and again to have it so returned, and 
still the great waters of God^s love to flow over us and over- 
whelm us, until the vehemence of our impassioned peace 
and the daring vigor of our yearning adoration reach be- 
yond the sight of our most venturous imagining ; — what 
is all this but for our souls to live a life of the most intelli- 
gent entrancing ecstasy, and yet not be shivered by the 
fiery heat ? There have been times on earth when we have 
caught our own hearts loving God, and there was a flash 
of light, and then a tear, and after that we lay down to rest. 
happy that we were ! Worlds could not purchase from 
us even the memory of those moments. And yet when we 
think of heaven, we may own that we know not yet what 
manner of thing it is to love the Lord our God. 

Meanwhile it is difi&cult to conceive how the pure plea- 
sures of the glorified senses, or the delights of our illumi- 
nated understandings, or the expansion of our souls dilated 



260 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

with immortality, or the magnificences of celestial love, can 
be of any price at all in our eyes, seeing that they are but 
the outside fringes of heaven, the merest accessories of our 
true beatitude. To see God face to face, as He is ; to gaze 
undazzled on the Three Divine Persons, cognisable and dis- 
tinct in the burning fires of their inaccessible splendors ; to 
behold that long coveted sight, and endless Generation of 
the All-holy Son, and our hearts to hold the joy, and not 
die ; to watch with spirits all outstretched in adoration the 
ever-radiant and inefi'ably beautiful Procession of the Holy 
Ghost from the Father and the Son, and to participate our- 
selves in that jubilee of jubilees, and drink in with greedy 
minds the wonders of that Procession, and the marvellous 
distinctness of its beauty from the Generation of the Son ; 
to feel ourselves with ecstatic awe, and yet with seraphic 
intimacy, overshadowed by the Person of the Unbegotten 
Father, the Father to whom and of whom we have said so 
much on earth, the Fountain of Godhead, who is truly our 
Father, while He is also the Father of the Eternal Son; to 
explore, with exulting license and with unutterably glad 
fear, attribute after attribute, oceans opening into oceans 
of divinest beauty ; to lie astonished in unspeakable con- 
tentment before the vision of God's surpassing Unity, so 
long the joyous mystery of our predilection, while the Vision 
through all eternity seems to grow more fresh and bright 
and new: -— my poor soul ! what canst thou know of this, 
or of these beautiful necessities, of thy exceeding love, which 
shall only satisfy itself in endless alternations, now of silence 
and now of song ? 

These are the rewards of God, these the ways in which 
He repays our love. To hear them or to read of them is 
not enough. Years of continual meditation will not even 
give us an adequate conception of them. To estimate them 
rightly we must have a true and profound knowledge of 
God, and be able to think ww^thily of His greatness. With- 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 261 

out this we can never know the abyss of condescension to 
which He stoops in order to confer a grace upon the loftiest 
of His saints. He has as it were to humble Himself even 
to receive the burning wol«hip of the purest seraphim. 
to what a lowness does He bend Himself in order to 
accept the love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary 1 Without 
repeated meditations on the Divine Perfections we cannot 
fathom the depth of our own nothingness, the horror of our 
own baseness, the inconceivable pertinacity of our sin ; 
neither can we realize, not only the littleness of our love, 
which is so little that the poorest words give an exaggerated 
impression of it, but also to what extent God is free from 
obligations to us, and to how little, little at least compared 
with the immensity of His actual mercies, our nature can 
lay claim as its due because it is a creature. Yet an accu- 
rate spiritual apprehension of all these things is needful, 
before we can appreciate the mysterious magnificence of the 
rewards of God. Only let us remember, for life is short 
and there is much to do, that right down through the abyss 
of our own nothingness lies the shortest road to the con- 
templation of the Divine Beauty. 

While I stand in the psesence of these mighty recom- 
penses of our Creator, I am abashed by their exceeding mag- 
nitude, and all things else which I otherwise should love be- 
come insignificant and go almost out of sight. I feel that 
I have no words to tell these great things, no thoughts to 
think them ; and yet it seems to me as if the way in which 
God repays our love was something even more wonderful 
than the rewards He gives. To see God face to face is the 
crowning joy of heaven ; to be sensibly near Him is the 
greatest joy of earth ; and He never seems so near as in the 
way in which He deals with us. His demeanor towards us, 
His manner. His address, His courtesy, if I may for the 
moment use such word.^. At first sight it is altogether so 
unlike what we should have expected -, and yet on second 



262 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

thoughts SO right, so suitable, both to His greatness and to 
our littleness, while at the same time its being right and 
suitable does not in the least detract from its gratuitous 
condescension. Nay, it rather enhances it. In truth, God's 
goodness is unlike any other subject of human contempla- 
tion ; for the more reasonable it appears to us, the more 
surprising does it grow, as if, even now and here, it 
partook somewhat of the eternal freshness of the Beatific 
Vision. 

When the Creator of the world entered it in order to 
redeem it, in the obscure midnight, in a gloomy cavern, 
as the Babe of Bethlehem, it was an advent such as took 
the natural speculations of men by surprise, and was even 
a hinderance to their belief. So is it with God's demeanor 
towards us in the world. He is not like a great king. He 
is unlike one both in the frequency of His visits, or rather 
in His abiding presence, and also in the absence of pomp 
and notice when He comes. There is no attitude of 
command, no obvious graciousness of condescension. — 
Blessed be His Majesty ! His manner is not that of 
a master, nor even of an equal; it is rather that of an 
inferior, mingled with the sweetness and fidelity of an 
earthly mother. When He blesses us, assists us, gives us 
graces, soothes our sorrows, or dries our tears, He does it 
all with an amazing tenderness, almost with a sort of bash- 
ful humility, like one whom we are laying under an obli- 
gation by accepting His services at all. The attentions of 
His love are also so minute, that no service, or half-service, 
or transitory intentions of ours, escape His divine yet just 
exaggerations. In our past life there are thousands of for- 
gotten prayers, thousands of resisted temptations ; but God 
has forgotten none of them. He repays them with a mind- 
fulness which, unless it also awakens love, can hardly fail 
to try our faith. He must indeed desire our love, who 
tempts us with an eternal reward for a cup of cold water 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 263 

given in His Name. He repays us also variously and with 
a view to our tastes and desires, so as to enhance to each 
of us the value of our own particular reward. He repays 
us superabundantly. At first sight it seems as if there 
was an absence of all similitude between the service and 
the reward, both in degree and kind. Nevertheless there 
is to His wisdom an exact and unerring proportion in His 
recompense, which, while the manner of it is a mystery to 
us, is at the same time an encourag^ement to us to love Him 
more, as if He had affectionately and condescendingly put 
it in our own power to have as much of heaven and of Him 
as we please. Last of all, throughout the whole proceed- 
ing, it is in reality love, and not services, which He repays, 
not the acts we do, so much as the spirit in which we do them. 
Can we conceive of a manner more attractive, of an affection 
more winning, of a solicitude more delightful, of a gratitude 
more touching, of an unselfishness more sweetly reproach- 
ful, of a generosity more overwhelming, of a magnificence 
more delicate, than this demeanor of the Creator towards 
His creatures ? And it is none other than the Creator, the 
boundless Ocean of Being, the abyss of unfathomable per- 
fections, who to the gigantic stretch of His omnipotence 
can wed these ineffable delicacies of minutest love 1 And 
it is to us that all this done, to us who had no rights to be- 
gin with, and who have again and again forfeited all rights 
we could imagine might be ours, to us who in our secret 
hearts know ourselves to be what we are, more unspeak- 
ably wicked than any one of our fellows-creatures suspects 
that we can be ! And the love which is thus repaid, alas ! 
what a mockery of love it is ! 

Let us think once more of heaven. How cheerfully the 
thought of that bright home can humble us ! What can 
be more wonderful than the contrast between man paying 
God on earth, and God paying man in heaven ? We have 
looked at man's side in the last chapter. We have seen 



264 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 

the misery and unworthiness, the scantiness and the mean- 
ness, the coldness, the reluctance, the distraction, and the 
ungracious delays of the creature with the Creator. And 
then comes death 1 A good death is one in which we feel 
that hitherto we have never done any good at all, but in 
which we seriously, though with alarming self-distrust, in- 
tend, if we survive, to begin to do good. And considering 
the greatness of God and the vastness of our obligations to 
Him, this is by no means a fiction even to the Saints. We 
die, and in dying we fall into the hands of His justice, and 
there, fresh wonder of creative love 1 we find far more than 
mercy. Our guardian angel could scarcely let us into hea- 
ven if he wished, were he the judge. The Mother of mercy 
would have to borrow the Sacred Heart of Jesus, before she 
could see things as He sees them, and award a crown to us. 
If there could be shame in heaven, how should we be over- 
whelmed with confusion appearing there with the miserable 
tribute of our interested love and of our wisely selfish fear! 
But how does the Creator, the King of kings, receive His 
tribute ? He bursts forth all divinely into triumph, because 
a half-converted sinner has condescended to accept His 
grace. He bids the angels rejoice, and hold high feast 
through all the empyrean heaven, not because He has 
evolved some new and wonder-stirring system out of no- 
thing, not because he has called into being some million- 
worlded nebula, and cast upon it such an effulgence of His 
beauty as throws all the rest of His creation into the shade, 
— but because one wretched, unworthy, offensive man has, 
after an immense amount of divine eloquence and pleading, 
consented to take the first step towards not being damned, 
one outcast of human society, who has drunk his fill of 
every vice, has graciously condescended for fear of hell to 
accept heaven ! These are the Creator's triumphs, these 
the ovations of everlasting and of all-wise mercy. And 
God can do nought unworthy of Himself. He cannot de- 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 265 

mean Himself. Abasement is impossible to Him. Nothing 
can sully His incomparable purity. Nothing can He do 
which is not infinitely worthy of Him, worthy of His 
power, His wisdom, and His goodness. And therefore this 
triumph, this feast of angels, over one sinner that does 
penance, is altogether worthy of the adorable majesty of 
the eternally blessed God ! who would not weep over 
the wonders of creative love, mystery after mystery, at 
every turn giving out fresh treasures of tenderness, com- 
passion, and magnificence ? 

Watch that soul which is now just entering heaven. 
Can anything be more amazing than the caresses which 
God is lavishing upon it ? Heaven itself has almost grown 
brighter by its entrance, and the anthems of the redeemed 
have sounded forth with a more full sonorous melody. 
Mary on her throne has been filled with joy, while an ex- 
ulting thrill of sympathy ran through all the angelic mul- 
titudes. And why do they rejoice? Eecause there is a 
new joy for God, another glory for His complacency to rest 
on. It is the salvation of that soul which has just entered 
heaven. Some fifty years of the full use of reason it lived 
on earth. The world was its delight, wealth almost its 
idol. It drank its fill of various pleasures, and ^bought 
not of His goodness out of which they come. Many times 
the divine law came across that man's path, and when it 
did, he straightway, and with little reflection, transgressed 
it. He loved luxury, denied himself nothing, and was not 
over-bountiful to the poor. He was surrounded by com- 
forts, as a city is compassed by its walls. He had sorrows 
and troubles, who has not ? But they were light and in- 
frequent. The world smiled upon its votary. He was 
popular with his fellows. He had all that his indolent am- 
bition cared to have ; and, best of all, he was blessed with 
almost unbroken health. There was at last almost the 
weariness of satiety about his undeviatingly prosperous 



266 IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOYE. 

fortune. Disease came, and his old joys ceased to be joys 
at all. He had nothing then to tempt him from God, but 
everything to draw him nearer to Him. Fear also, with 
the belief of hell, wrought strongly upon him ; and by the 
help of priest and sacrament, together with the grace of 
a very moderate sorrow, he put together in some ten days 
the dregs of half a century spent in the service of the 
devil and the world ; and he has now gone through a very 
circuitous path in purgatory to heaven to offer God this 
refuse of his probation. And heaven keeps feast for this ! 
And the great Creator takes almost with avidity the leav- 
ings of the world, counting for chivalry the querulous 
helpless of a sin-enfeebled soul. There is not one word 
of reproach, one look of discontent. Coupled with his 
extraordinary mindfulness of minutest services, God is 
seemingly forgetful how all good is but His own grace. 
Moreover He is as it were blind to the fact that the man 
was after all doing what was best for himself, and when he 
could hardly help himself, and even then with amazingly 
little of self-indignation or of righteous zeal. See ! His 
arms are round that deathbed penitent. He is telling Him 
the secrets of His love. He is sealing for him with a. 
Father's kiss the eternity of his beatitude. That man 
will lie for ever bathed in the beautiful light of the God- 
head ! 

Is this credible ? Should we dare to believe it, if it were 
not of faith ? wonderful, wonderful God ! of whom each 
hour is telling us something new, making premature per- 
petual heaven in our hearts ! It is an old history, that love 
makes the Creator seem to put Himself below His own 
creatures : it is an old history, yet it surprises us almost to 
tears each morning as we wake. So here we come to a 
Servant-God, like the Incarnate Servant- Saviour, Jesus 
Christ. And yet there are men to whom God is a difficulty ! 
There are men who think hard thoughts of Him, whose 



IN WHAT WAY GOD REPAYS OUR LOVE. 267 

only trial of us is in the prodigious excesses of His love, 
which wearies and outstrips at times the slowness of our 
faith. Heavenly Father ! it is the greatness of Thy 
goodness which bewilders our humility by mocking our 
knowledge of ourselves ; and that is the only diJ05culty we 
find in Thee. let it grow still more difficult, still more 
beyond our grasp, for therein is our eternal life ! 

What then is the conclusion to which we come about this 
repaying of our love by God ? It is simply this. In the 
first place. He has made His glory coincide with our in- 
terests. Secondly, from a privilege He lowers love into a 
precept, and this one act is a complete revelation of Him- 
self. Thirdly, He so puts our interests into His, that it is 
hard to look at His interests only, without falling into 
heresy. Do these conclusions solve the five questions we 
have been asking ? No ! but they lead to the one answer 
of all the five, only that, ending as we began, the answer 
is itself a mystery. St. John states it ; no one can explain 
it ; earth would be hell without it ; purgatory is paradise 
because of it ; we shall live upon it in heaven, yet never 
learn all that is in it ; — God is love ! 



BOOK III. 



x2 



(269) 



THE 

CREATOR AND THE CREATURE. 



BOOK III. 

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE EASINESS OF SALVATION 

L'estat de la redemption vaut cent fois mieux que celuy de I'innocenco. 

S. Francis of Sales. 

The result of the preceding inquiry has been at the very 
least to satisfy us as to the fact that God loves us, and as to 
the nature and character of His love. We have seen that 
Divine love is at once creative, redeeming, sanctifying, un- 
created, and without respect of persons. As creative it 
was not content to call angels and men out of nothing, but 
it constituted them at the outset in a* state of grace, which 
was not connatural to them, and was in no way due to their 
nature. As redeeming, it pursued men when they fell ; and 
at no less an expense than the Incarnation of One of the 
Divine Persons, and with every circumstance of attraction 
and prodigality, it bought them back again when they had 
sold themselves as slaves to evil. As sanctifying, it is in- 
cessant in its visitations of grace, and marvellous in the 
heights of sanctity to which it can raise those whom sin 
had sunk so low. As uncreated, it is especially astonishing 

(271) 



272 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

and adorable, and naturally includes, and while it includes 
surpasses, all created ties and all diversities of human love. 
As v^ithout respect of persons, it enables us to repose our 
trust, not only on the all-efficacious power of God, but upon 
that beautiful justice and exquisite fidelity which are the 
true foundations of our love. 

In this love of God we have already passed an eternity. 
In this love we have lived without beginning. He has never 
seen His glorious Word, but He has seen us in Him, and 
the mutual love of Father and of Son from the first has 
scattered its brightness on our foreseen lives. There is 
something awful in such enduring love, something which 
overshadows the spirits of creatures so capricious and in- 
constant as ourselves. It frightens us that we should have 
been loved eternally. At the same time what must be the 
necessary efficacy of an eternal love ? Here is a very mine 
of golden consolation. He who has not ceased to love us 
from for ever, will not lightly withdraw His love. He will 
not easily surrender to His enemies a creature whom He 
has borne in His bosom like a nurse from the beginning. 
Into the least of His blessings He pours an endless love. 
There are no infirmities which He disdains, no prayers 
which He disregards. He cannot love otherwise than with 
an overflowing love, rewarding the most trivial actions, 
canonizing the most transitory wishes, and placing around 
every step of life such a retinue of graces, such an attend- 
ance of angels, such an apparatus of sacraments, that the 
self-will must be strong indeed which can break away from 
God and lose itself. 

He apparently consults our interests rather than His 
own, by making, in reality, the last identical with the first. 
His first thought for sinners is to make repentance easy 
and light ; and strange indeed are the things to which His 
wisdom can persuade His justice, or His goodness bend 
His sanctity. By His own order, our liberty seems to take 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 273 

precedence of His law, while the whole of creation is ap- 
parently disposed for the convenience of our salvation. 
The increase of this love depends upon ourselves. On this 
side the grave we can have it when we will, and there is 
always grace to enable us to ask it and to will it. The 
more we ask the more He will give, and reckon the obliga- 
tion to be on His side rather than on ours. All that is 
wanted of us is, to take God^s side, to love what He loves, 
to hate what he hates, and, to sum up all in one word, to 
belong to Jesus Christ. 

This is a summary of the results at which we have 
arrived, and it brings us to the conclusion of the second 
division of our treatise. In the first, we inquired what it 
was to be a creature, and what it was to have a Creator, 
and we saw that creation meant and only could mean love. 
Full of the knowledge we had thus acquired, we proceeded 
to ask five questions, concerning the principal mysteries 
of this Divine Love, which, from its eternal hiding-place in 
God, came into sight at creation ; and we saw that our 
position as creatures made it important to us to have these 
questions answered. Bat it may be objected. All this is so 
much special pleading for God, It does not state man's 
case fairly, because it does not state it completely. There 
are certain phenomena which are practical objections to 
this view, and they have hardly been considered. This is 
what may be said. I do not own the justice of it, because, 
as I have said before, if I understand rightly what it is to 
be a creature, and what it is to have a Creator, I do not see 
how the creature can have any side at all. It appears that 
God's side is also the creature's side, and that he can have 
no other. If we imagine for ourselves an immensely bene- 
volent despot, in possession of the most legitimate claims 
upon our obedience, but bound, by the rectitude of his own 
character, as well as by our rights, to the exercise of com- 
mutative justice, and call him the Creator, under such a 
18 



274 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

being we should obviously have a side of our own, and a 
point of view belonging to us. But that is no adequate 
description of God. It is only an uneasy intellectual 
creation of our own. But, if there be a chance of gaining 
any more love for God from the hearts of his creatures, 
most willingly should we engage in the task of meeting 
these objections ; the more willingly, because the soil to 
be turned up is so rich, concerning, as it does, the Creator^s 
love of His creatures, that it will bloom with fresh and 
fresh blossoms, almost before the plough has furrowed up 
the surface. 

Our object, however, is strictly a practical one. Hence, 
we are not going to enter into any of the abstruse questions 
about the origin of evil, or the existence of hell, or the 
permission of idolatry, or the eternal destiny of those out- 
side the Church. We are speaking to the children of the 
Church ; and, however dark such questions may be to 
them, or however worthy of their most vigorous intellec- 
tual research, they have no right to be practical difficulties 
to a Catholic in the pursuit of holiness. Strictly speaking, 
we have no right to have any difficulties at all ; for a specu- 
lative difficulty can hardly become a practical one to men 
who take the teaching of the Church on faith ; and men 
who do not, how shall they dream of attaining holiness at 
all? Nevertheless, there are some questions which, if not 
without fault of ours, at least without grievous fault, tease 
and molest us, and become, not unfrequently, sometimes 
the sources, and at other times the hotbeds, of temptation. 
Of these, we may select three, especially, because, in 
handling them, we shall implicitly and indirectly answer 
many more. The first is, the difficulty of salvation ; the 
second, the ultimate fate of the great multitude of the 
faithful ; and the third, the perplexing question of world- 
liness ; and these will occupy this and the two following 
chapters. 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 275 

It is objected, that all that has been said of the creative 
love of God would lead to the conclusion, that it is easy to 
be saved, or that, if it is not easy, the case has not been 
stated in its entireness. To this objection it does not seem 
a suflficient answer to say, that God is not less good, but 
that the awful malice and corruption of man^s will are too 
strong even for His will to save us. For, though it is true 
that God cannot both leave us free and constrain us to be 
saved, yet His redeeming love might be expected to make 
such allowances for the unhappy degradation of man by 
sin, as to make his salvation not a work of more than 
ordinary difficulty. Surely, these allowances are implied 
in the very notion of redemption. If heaven be not easy 
of access, neither its beauty, nor the generosity with which 
it is offered, are such motives of love as they would be on 
the contrary supposition. The most perfectly satisfactory 
answer to the objection, if it be true, is, that salvation is 
easy. We are speaking only to and of believers, and are 
not concerning ourselves with a secret which God has 
reserved for Himself, and into which we do not attempt 
to penetrate, even by guesses, because it has no practical 
bearing upon our own service of God. To a believer, sal- 
vation is easy; so easy, in fact, that, to each individual 
soul in the Church, the chances are greatly in favor of his 
salvation. This may not be true of him at any given mo- 
ment, as when he has just relapsed into sin, or when he is 
enfeebled by a long, wilful captivity to sinful habits, but, 
looking at his life as a whole, and considering things in the 
long run, it is true that the chances are greatly in favor 
of his salvation ; and I have my misgivings that I am even 
thus understating his prospects of success. His life must 
be a life of efforts ; but the efforts are easy — easy in them- 
selves, easy in their auxiliaries, easy in both the prospect 
of a future and the enjoyment of a present reward. What 
else is the meaning of our Lord's words : Come to me, all 



276 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

you that labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. 
Take up My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, because I 
am meek, and humble of heart ; and you shall find rest to 
your souls. For My yoke is sweet, and My burden light.^ 
Or, again, what can be more distinct than the words of St. 
John: For this is the charity of God, that we keep His 
commandments ; and His commandments are not heavy. 
For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world ; and 
this is the victory which overcometh the world, our faith ?f 

The first point, then, for us to consider, is the easiness 
of salvation in itself. Let no one be afraid that, if the 
affirmative of this proposition be proved, it will make any 
of us sluggish and indifferent in the pursuit of Christian 
perfection. Divine truth is continually exerting an influ- 
ence and putting forth an attraction, which baffle and deride 
the guesses and predictions of our human criticism. If the 
view be true, it will lead men to love God who do not love 
Him now, and it will lead those who love Him already to 
love Him more. It is not the fear of hell which draws men 
to aim at perfection, nor is it the ambition to be saints 
which buoys them up through mortification, weariness, and 
prayer. It is the beauty of God, which has touched them 
and taken them captive ; and whatever discloses more of 
that beauty, will be but a stronger attraction enabling them 
to scale higher summits. So while our enquiry will give 
us sweet and hopeful views of sinners, it will also humble, 
edify, and stimulate ourselves, if we are trying to advance 
in the ways of God. 

Let us then trace from the first the process by which God 
vouchsafes to save a soul. Not many da3^s elapse after a 
child of catholic parents is born, before he is carried to the 
baptismal font. There by the almost momentary action 
of pouring water in the Name of the Most Holy and Un- 
divided Trinity, the child is regenerated. Nothing can be 

* St. Matt. xi. 1 1 St. John, v. 



TPIE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 277 

more easy, or more instantaneous. Yet let us consider all 
that is involved in an infantas baptism. Not only are the 
eternal consequences of the fall to his particular soul in 
one instant destroyed, but the child becomes entitled to the 
most stupendous privileges and inheritance, which vrould 
not have been due to him naturally, even if Adam had not 
fallen. He is at once raised to a far higher state than one 
of pure nature. He is the child of God. The Divine Na- 
ture has been communicated to him by sanctifying grace. 
Extraordinary possibilities of spiritual developements and 
earnests of everlasting life have been implanted in him by 
certain mysteriously infused habits of the theological virtues, 
faith, hope, and charity, perhaps of the other virtues also."^ 
Seven other supernatural habits, standing in the same rela- 
tion to the actual impulses of the Holy Ghost as the other 
infused habits stand to actual grace, and which bear the 
name of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, are also infused into 
him, containing in themselves spiritual provisions for the 
greater occasions of his life, for his more intimate inter- 
course with God, and, if so be, for the magnificent opera- 
tions of heroic sanctity. Meanwhile, if he dies before the 
use of reason, there is secured to him the eternal vision of 
God, with all the intellectual glories of an immortal spirit, 
whose intelligence had never been developed upon earth at 
all. Now all this haste, if we may so speak, with which the 

* Benedict XIY. (de Canonizat. iii. 21) says it is as yet a disputed point, 
■whether there is at baptism an infusion of the moral virtues together with 
the theological. St. Thomas (I. 2. qu. 63. art. 3) discusses the question 
whether any moral yirtues are given to us by infusion, and he answers it 
affirmativelj', because it is necessary that effects should correspond propor- 
tiouately to their causes and principles. (Cf. Salmanticenses in cursu iii. tr. 
ii. disp. 3.) Scotus on the other hand denies the infusion of the moral virtues, 
(in iii. sent. dist. xxxvi. qu. unic. art, 3). A gloss on the decree of Clement 
V. in the Council of Vienne, gives these opposite opinions, and the question 
of the connection between the habits of the theological and moral virtues is 
left open, because of the authority of those doctors who do not admit the 
infusion of the moral virtues in infant baptism. 
Y 



278 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

divine mercy seizes the infant's soul, refusing to wait for 
his consent or till he can accept God's great gift by a ra- 
tional act of his own, implies such a determined and exu- 
berant love on the part of the Creator, that it is not easily 
to be conceived, that the rest of the process of salvation 
shall not partake of the same character of divine impatience 
and facility. 

The baptized child, when he comes to the use of reason, 
finds himself under a code of laws, the object of which is to 
secure his salvation by prescribing the conditions on which 
it is to be obtained. These are the ten commandments of 
God and the six precepts of the Church. They are few in 
number and easy of observance, at least easy under ordi- 
nary circumstances, and on the occasions when they are 
difficult, quite marvellous assistances of supernatural grace 
are prepared and heaped upon the soul. The man finds 
himself in a world of many pleasures, and of these com- 
paratively few are sinful ; and if the world is full of dangers 
too, it is always to be remembered that the fatal enemy of 
the soul, mortal sin, cannot lie in ambush for it or take it 
by surprise. Full deliberation and advertence are neces- 
sary to the commission of a mortal sin. When we think 
who God is and ponder His eternal truth and ineffable 
sanctity, it must be a wonder to us that any sin is venial, 
that no number of venial sins can make a mortal sin, and 
that no habits of venial sin, however inveterate, unworthy, 
deliberate, or against special lights, can themselves destroy 
the soul. It is wonderful that a man can be graciously 
visited by the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, can feel 
assured in his own mind that such and such practices or 
self-denials are really the desire of God in his case, and yet 
be also sure that those inspirations are not intended as a 
law, and the resistance of them therefore not a sin, though 
all want of generosity with God will ultimately and indi- 
rectly work its way to sin. Furthermore the condition of 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 279 

the creature seems to be untruthfulness. Ever3'thlng is 
false around us, full of excuse, pretence, and insincerity. 
Yet falsehood is the very opposite of God, who is eternal 
truth, and it is equally the characteristic of the evil one 
whom our Lord Himself has named the father of lies. 
Nevertheless lying is a venial sin. No number of lies how- 
ever wilful, so long as they are not sins against justice also, 
can of themselves destroy the soul. Surely this doctrine is 
full of difficulty. 

The whole subject of sin abounds with truths of this de- 
scription, which are more trying to the faith than the mys- 
teries either of the Holy Trinity or the Eucharist. Thus 
the remission of venial sin, one of the most interesting 
questions in the whole range of theology, appears to be so 
easy as to be almost unconscious, and to be quite as inces- 
sant as its commission. Blessings, holy water, other sacra- 
mentals, the signs of the cross, the Name of Jesus, passing 
acts of sorrow, nay, some have said, any lifting up of the 
mind to God, and behold ! the guilt of these sins falls from 
us like a withered leaf from the autumnal tree. And what 
hosts of venial sins, forgotten and unrepented of, may not 
a man possibly take with him into the next world, as mat- 
ter for the fires of purgatory, and which can only delay, 
and not prohibit, his entrance into glory ? All this does 
not look as if God was a taskmaster, or as if heaven were 
only for the few. Indeed the wa}^ in which He can show 
all this leniency and make these singular allowances for 
our infirmity, and at the same time secure purity of heart 
and real love of Himself, is the most astonishing phenome- 
non which falls under the observation of those who have to 
minister to the consciences of men. How men can be so 
very good at the same time that they are so very bad, it is 
not easy to explain, while experience leaves us in no doubt 
whatever of the fact. 

AYhat is said of the doctrine of venial sin may be said 



280 THE EASINESS OF SALTATION. 

also of the doctrine of intention. What duty could seem 
more simple on the part of a creature than a perpetual 
application of mind and heart to his Creator ? We are not 
our own, and we are not left to ourselves. We are working 
under our Father^s eye, and it is for Him that we are work- 
ing, and at His appointed work. Hence the road to sanc- 
tity is by the way of actual intentions for the glory of 
God. It should be every one's prime occupation to make 
his intentions actual. All other virtues will come along 
with this. Surprising treasures of grace will be unlocked 
to us if w^e attempt it. This one practice will turn 
darkness into light all over our souls, and no sinful 
habit, however inveterate, can exist in the atmosphere 
of this most glorious of all spiritual exercises. Yet does 
any one believe that an actual intention is absolutely 
necessary to the goodness of an action? Does God get no 
glory from man's free will, except when man there and 
then intends it? It may be a question how long a virtual 
intention lasts, to what extent it can inform and invigorate 
our actions, and insinuate a supernatural character into 
them, or what amount of original intensity is required in 
the morning's intention to give it momentum enough to 
push its w^ay through the crow'ded actions of an entire 
solar day. All these may be questions. But no one 
maintains that any such assiduous application to God as is 
a notable difficulty to our infirm and easily distracted 
nature is at all necessary to salvation. 

Such are the strange relations in which our baptized 
child finds himself to his Creator as he growls up, and life 
broadens out before him. But there are graver matters 
still than venial sins, apparently countless untruths, neglect 
of inspirations, or the paucity of actual intentions for 
God's glory. There is the question of mortal sin. It is a 
fearful thing for the creature to turn away wholly from the 
Creator, and w^e can well understand how it should at 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 281 

once destroy the life of grace in the soul. Grace can live 
with any quantity of venial sin. So long as the eclipse of 
God in the soul is not total, so long with amazing conde- 
scension and as it were a blind love of souls does He con- 
tinue to dwell within us. But when the eclipse is total, 
what can follow but total darkness also ? This seems in- 
evitable, and yet it is not so. Notwithstanding the horrible 
malice of mortal sin, as being fully perceived and delibe- 
rately admitted, the grand gift of faith, that almost unfailing 
power of coming right again, survives the commission of a 
mortal sin. The life of hope does not become extinct; 
nay, it requires a fresh, distinct, and most difficult mortal 
sin to destroy that supernatural habit, which gives the 
soul the buoyancy and elasticity requisite to its conversion. 
Now is it quite easy to see how two supernatural habits, 
two heavenly powers, two divine elements, not natural to 
man, but gratuitously infused into him at baptism, are not 
forfeited and expelled by the extinction of the life of grace 
in the soul by mortal sin? God is eclipsed in the soul; 
hell has begun in it, helFs worst punishment, the loss of 
God ; and there are two celestial virtues preaching in the 
darkness still, conspiring against the reign of evil, holding 
their fortresses with magnanimous patience, it may be for 
long, long years of siege, and attracting to themselves in- 
cessant crowds of volunteers in the shape of actual graces. 
Is not all this wonderful? Is it compatible with the 
theory that salvation is difficult ? Is not mortal sin itself, 
against its will, a new revelation of the pertinacious love 
of God ? 

But more still. Of the thousands of souls in the world 
to-day, unhappily immersed in the gulfs of mortal sin, is 
^Vthere one whom a whole multitude of beautiful actual 
graces is not soliciting to return to God? such pathetic 
invitations to come back to Him, such fair lights of God's 
tender compassion riding over the dark soul like the white 

t2 



282 THE EASINESS OF SALTATION. 

sunbeams over a stormy landscape, such sweet remorses, 
sharp, but very, very sweet, such cold sobering thoughts 
of future punishment, such wise artful alternations of 
crosses and consolations, such lifelike speakings of dead 
books, such barbed words of preachers, such solemn elo- 
quence of the deaths of those we love, such a nameless 
sensible thraldom of God and grace and heavenly presences, 
which we never can shake off: — all these, now with a very 
clamor of assaulting armies, now with low, soft, and song- 
like pleadings, are the forces of actual grace, which have 
never been drawn off from before the gates of the hearty 
however long they may have been obstinately barred 
against God by a countless garrison of mortal sins. 

But the most remarkable feature of the baptized souFs 
position with regard to mortal sin is the perpetual, un- 
limited iteration of the sacrament of penance. That there 
should be such a sacrament at all, after the completeness 
and magnificence of Baptism, is a miracle of divine love. 
But that the Precious Blood of the Incarnate Word should 
be always at hand, like a public fountain at a road-side, 
open, gratuitous, and everflowing, for the convenience of 
all passers by, could not be believed, if the Church did not 
assure us of it. Our sheer inability to comprehend a love 
so great as God^s would make simple Novatians of us, if 
we had not the Church to inform the littleness of our own 
conceptions by the magnificence of her dogmas. Is it easy 
to imagine the mercy which will absolve from different 
mortal sins the same soul perhaps five hundred times in 
ten or twenty years, and some thousands of times in the 
course of life ? Yet this is not an extravagant or fabulous 
case. Then again think of the completeness of the abso 
lution. Each time it destroys the guilt of the sin comple- 
tely, so that it can never rise again, never bring back, even 
to the relapsed sinner, its consequences of everlasting- 
punishment, while at the same time it wakens to vigorous 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 283 

life again merits that have been killed a hundred times b^ 
sin. How special, how ingenious, how peculiar, how un- 
like anything human is this process ; and yet on reflection 
how naturally outflowing from the Divine Perfections ! 

No kind, no number, no duration of sins impede the 
facility of absolution. Its eflScacy is always instantaneous. 
The word is spoken, and the work is done. But what is 
still more marvellous is the little which is required for ab- 
solution, the ordinary fidelity of the confession, the positive 
imperfection of the sorrow, the moderate resoluteness of 
the purpose of amendment! Supernatural as all these 
must be, the confession, the sorrow, and the purpose, and 
depending for their validity on certain theological requrre- 
ments, yet are they not among the commonest graces in the 
Church? Is attrition a romantic flight of generosity, or 
the purpose of amendment akin to the heroism, of martyr- 
dom ? Surely these requisites for absolution seem com- 
pletely within the compass of our infirmity. And after all it 
is God Himself who is supplying more than half of them 
Himself by grace. In truth this enquiry into the easiness 
of salvation is beginning to fill us with fear, because it is 
carrying us so far ! But might it not have been expected 
that as Penance is more troublesome than Baptism, so each 
time that the Sacrament of Penance is repeated, the re- 
quisites for absolution might have been increased, that the 
sinner should have bidden higher for pardon after every 
fall and that there should have been at least so much 
punishment for his relapses as consists in an increase of 
his difficulties in winning God back to him again. Yet 
we know that this is not at all the case. The habitual 
sinner and he who has once fallen, the sinner of a day 
and the sinner of half a century — to all the simple 
requisites for absolution remain the same. Nay even where 
the confessor exacts from the penitent more convincing 
evidence of his repentance, it is only the confessor's inevi- 



284 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

table infirmity as a creature, and as such unable to read 
the heart ; God leaves the light conditions of absolution just 
what they were before. If all this were not among God's 
daily mercies, how inscrutable would it not seem to us ; but 
we are obliged without fault of ours to tread God's common 
mercies under foot, because He has so profusely strewn the 
whole earth with them, that there is not room to move. 

There still remains a debt due to God from remitted sin, 
a debt of temporal punishment. This men may be content 
to bear, seeing that salvation has been made so easy to 
them, and the malice of their sins has been so great. But 
God will not suffer this. Straight from the confessional the 
Church leads her son into the fertile and exuberant region 
of Indulgences. There the Precious Blood is made to flow 
even over the temporal consequences of forgiven sin. God 
would not stop at mere salvation. It is His way to over- 
flow and to exceed. There shall not be a disability in the 
sinner's path, not a relic of his own foolish covenants with 
sin, which shall be left to molest him. Nay the relics of 
sin shall have a strange sacrament to themselves in the 
Extreme Unction of the dying. But even this is not enough. 
Souls must be saved, and the saved multiplied, and the 
heavenly banquet crowded, even if the constraints of fire 
be needed to anneal the hastier works of grace. Therefore 
is it that the vast realms of purgatory are lighted up with 
the flames of vindictive love. Thus a huge amount of im- 
perfect charity shall bring forth its thousands and its tens 
of thousands for heaven. Redemption shall cover the whole 
earth, and be plentiful indeed, and the very unworthinesses 
and short comings of the creature shall only still more 
provoke the prodigality of the Blood of the Creator. the 
mercy of those cleansing fires! what could h^ve devised 
them but a love that was almost beside itself for expedients ? 
Yet even these fires the sinner can avoid, if he please, and 
vrithout the difficulties of heroic charity. But they shall be 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 285 

made to east their light even upon earth before their time, 
and the Precious Blood shall be turned upon them by In- 
dulgences, and they shall be quenched before their blister- 
ing tongues have touched the sinner's soul. talk of the 
difficulty of salvation after this! And what was Divine 
Love doing, when we last caught a glimpse of it at work? 
Ah ! as at first, so at last, there is the divine impatience, 
the divine facility, of a Creator who seems as if He could 
not do without His creatures. We saw love, and it was 
bending over purgatory, over the net which was almost 
breaking with the portentous draught of unlikely souls 
which it had taken. Mary was moving on her throne ; the 
saints were filling heaven with their intercessions ; angels 
were ascending and descending every moment: mass bells 
were ringing all over the earth, and beads being told, and 
numberless indulgences sealed in thousands of communions, 
and alms flowing in to the poor, and penances and pilgrim- 
ages being performed ; for Divine Love called loudly on 
angels, saints, and souls of mortal men, to do violence to it, 
while Jesus supplied the means in His daily adorable Sa- 
crifice and the plentiful treasury of His Precious Blood, 
Our last sight of love showed it to us impatiently shorten- 
ing the appointed time of those suffering souls, and heaven 
and earth astir, as if some great catastrophe had happened, 
because God Himself seemed as if He wished to cut short 
by swifter mercies that last grand consummate invention 
of His creative love, the quiet, unreluctant, beautifying 
pains of that cleansing fire ! 

When God came to His creatures visibly, He scandalized 
them. His three and thirty years were almost a series of 
scandals, taken by cold hearts at what appeared the very 
extravagances of His condescension. What wonder then 
that a scheme of salvation so easy, so pliant, so accommo- 
dating, so full of arrangement, and so exuberant, should be 
a scandal both to heretics and unbelievers ? It is the same 



286 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

Jesus who ate with publicans and sinners, who pleaded 
with the Samaritan woman, who rewarded the humble 
petulance of the Syro-Phoenician, who acquitted the woman 
taken in adultery, who absolved the Magdalen, and who 
carried off with Him as His first trophy to an instantaneous 
paradise the thief who hung upon the Cross. And shall 
we call that process hard, while our Mother the Church is 
maligned all day long for representing it so easy and so 
large ? 

Look at God's side of the question, and what can fall 
upon us but utter confusion, perhaps, if it were not for His 
grace, utter unbelief? Let us narrow our view to the mys- 
tery of our dearest Saviour's Passion. Count it all up, 
measure it in its length and breadth, fathom its depth, 
handle it and see what it weighs : then pray and suffer for 
a while, and count and measure and fathom and handle it 
all again, and see how it all has grown ; then pray and 
suffer more, and then repeat the process ; and at the end 
of a saintly life you will have but a superficial estimation 
of that astonishing life-giving mystery. From the sacrile- 
gious communion and treachery of Judas to the little gar- 
den of Gethsemane, through the brook up the rugged steep 
to Jerusalem, through the halls of Annas, Caiaphas and 
Pilate, and the court-yard of Herod, at the pillar of the 
scourging, in the guard-room of the thorny crowning, along 
the way of the Cross, up Calvary, at the nailing and the 
elevation, to the last cry about the ninth hour — follow the 
Eternal through this appalling drama, which was all for 
you, all one excess of His uncontrollable creative love to 
save your soul : and then put by the side of it the require- 
ments which are of obligation, our necessary amount of 
love and worship of Him, the prescribed frequentation of 
the sacraments, the extent of manly effort entailed upon us, 
and who can say that salvation is not easy, easy indeed to 
us, however hard it was upon the shoulders of the Incarnate 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 287 

Word. And then at last, the Beatific Vision ! Was there 
ever such a history? And yet, simple in her faith, and 
confiding in the inborn beauty and celestial charm of truth 
to protect itself, this is the Gospel which the unwearied 
Church is now boldly proclaiming to the corrupt popula- 
tions of the nineteenth century, as if it were a Concordat 
between the Creator and the Creature. 

Can we say more ? Or if there is more to be said, do we 
need to have it said ? Yes ! New love, new love, new love 
of God — we always need to know it, because we always 
need to love Him more and more. We thought of salvation 
as easy in itself, let us now look at it as easy because of its 
assistances. It appears already as if the utmost allowance 
had been made by God for the weakness and corruption of 
our nature, so as to put salvation within easy reach of us. 
But to secure it still more. He has formed alliances for us 
with Himself and the invisible world, and prepared a sys- 
tem of auxiliaries, both outward and inward, so ingenious 
and wonderful, as to be a stumbling-block to those who are 
not of the fold. 

First and foremost among these, and entering more or 
less into all of them, is Grace, a various, supernatural, 
potent, and unintermitting gift, about which enough has 
been said for the present purpose in the last chapter. 
There is not a characteristic either of it or of God's way of 
giving it, which does not bear upon the question of the 
easiness of salvation. Let us then keep this in mind, as 
well as what has just been said of the easiness of salvation 
in itself, while we enumerate some of those incredible aids 
and consolations which God has devised to make still easier 
what was already so easy in itself. What Catholic is there 
who does not know how the four great wants, and duties, 
and worships which the creature owes to the Creator, the 
petition of his infirmity, the intercession of his brotherly 
affection, the thanksgiving of his startled speechless grati- 



288 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

tude, the intelligent joyous acknowledgment of God's abso- 
lute dominion, are supplied to him, with an infinite worthi- 
ness equivalent to the worth of the Creator Himself, in the 
Adorable Sacrifice of the Mass ? The perpetual Real Pre- 
sence of Jesus with His faithful. His perseverance in the 
obscure tabernacle, and his frequent benedictions, which 
preside over the evenings of our toilsome days, just as Mass 
so beautifully fills the morning with its light and love, so 
that it is Jesus aU day long, courting our society, and 
mingling with us with an intimacy we get to understand 
less, and to prize more, the longer it is vouchsafed, — 
surely this is enough to supernaturalize the whole world, 
to make hard things easy, and dark things bright, and 
throw an invisible armor round us which will charm our 
lives against the weapons and the wiles of hell. But what 
shall we say of Communion ? All ideas of familiarity with 
God, of intimacy with the invisible world, of the spiritual 
union of heavenly love, fail us here. The creature, trem- 
bling, bashful, eager, backward, frightened, delighted, is 
bidden to kneel down, and feed, not figuratively or by faith, 
but with an awful bodily reality, upon his Incarnate Crea- 
tor. And this eating of the Creator by the creature is the 
highest act of worship which he can perform ! We need 
not stay to follow out the many-fountained grace of a good 
Communion, nor to see how it branches out into every 
faculty of the soul, every power of the mind, every aficction 
of the will, every delicate sensibility of the conscience, car- 
rying with it secret blessings multiform and manifold, and 
insinuating even into flesh and blood and bone, the seeds 
of a glorious resurrection. And this miraculous feast on 
our very Creator may be, and He loves it to be, our daily 
bread! And this to us, who, if we rightly appreciated our 
vileness, should be astonished every morning that our com- 
mon food and clothing were continued to us still ! 

All helps must seem little after this ; yet as they are all 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 289 

SO many fresh disclosures of creative love, we must not pass 
them over. Loneliness is one of the dangers which we 
have to fear, because of the inability of our mortal nature 
to cope with the adverse forces of the invisible world ; and, 
to meet this danger, the provident love of God has given us 
our Guardian Angel. Ever at our side there is a golden 
life being lived. A princely spirit is there, who sees God 
and enjoys the bewildering splendors of His Face even 
there, where he is, nearer than the limits of our outstretched 
arms. An unseen warfare is raging round our steps : but 
that beautiful bright spirit lets not so much as the sound 
of it vex our ears. He lights for us, and asks no thanks, 
but hides his silent victories, and continues to gaze on God. 
His tenderness for us is above all words. His office will 
last beyond the grave, until at length it merges into a still 
sweeter tie of something like heavenly equality, when on 
the morning of the resurrection we pledge each other, in 
those first moments, to an endless blessed love. Till then 
we shall never know from how many dangers he has de- 
livered us, nor how much of our salvation is actually due 
to him. Meanwhile he merits nothing by the solicitudes 
of his office. He is beyond the power of meriting, for he 
has attained the sight of God. His work is a work of 
love, because his sweet presence at our side he knows to 
be a part of God's eternal and creative love towards our 
particular soul. 

How great a joy and how real a support it is in sorrow, 
to have the prayers of a saintly man 1 We can hardly 
exaggerate the value of the blessing. To seek it is a sign 
of predestination. But look up to heaven! AYhat are good 
men on earth to the giant spirits there, and how many 
thousands and thousands are praying to our good Creator 
that we may not miss of the happy end of our creation. 
There are our patron saints whose names we bear, the 
saints whom we especially love, the saints of our order, our 
19 z 



290 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

vocation, or our country, the saints which were patrons of 
the holy souls whom we have liberated from purgatory, 
those Holy Souls now saints as well ; all these are like so 
many beadsmen for us before the throne of the Most High. 
Ghissed in Him, as in a pellucid mirror, they see the 
threads of our lives weaving their variously patterned web. 
They understand the purposes of God upon us. They are 
amazed at the diversity and suitableness of His loving arti- 
fices and delicately suited vocations. They see the dangers 
which threaten us, the temptations which penetrate farthest 
into us, the graces which are weakest in us, the critical 
moments of life which peril us ; and as they see, so do they 
pray. ! if we could but remember in our struggles with 
sin, how we are being backed before the throne of God, we 
should surely spurn the tempter from us in the exulting 
force of our Christian joy and the superhuman energy of 
the communion of saints. 

The Mother of God ! In what surpassing heights is she 
sublimely throned ! Yet there is not a day passes in which 
she does not interest herself for us. A thousand times and 
more has she mentioned our names to God in such a sweet 
persuasive way, that the Heart of Jesus sought not to resist 
it. She has been in the secret of all the good things which 
have ever happened to us in life. She has our predestina- 
tion at heart far more than we have ourselves. She is ever 
mindful of that second maternity which dates from Cal- 
vary, and how we cost her in the travail of her dolors a 
price which has no fellow except the Sacrifice of her Son, 
our Brother and our God. 1 what a light does it not 
shed on life, to think that the same love, the nameless love, 
the inexhaustible love, wherewith the Heart of Mary loved 
her blessed Son, is for His sake and by His own command 
being poured out over us this very hour! "We are lying 
now on earth, dear to heaven, because we are suffused with 
its pathetic splendors. Angels envy us a love which in 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 291 

their case cannot be, as ours is, identical in kind with that 
which the sinless Mother had for her adorable Son. But 
it is not the poetry of this thought on which we need to 
dwell, bright revelation as it is once more of God^s creative 
love, but on the real help, the substantial support, the im- 
mense solid advantages, the positive efficacy, of this love 
of Mary in the matter of our salvation. 

Then we have the power of prayer ourselves. "We dare 
not dwell much on this. But of how many theological 
controversies is the grace of prayer the secret and the key ! 
Can prayer mean that God will give up His own will, and 
accommodate it to ours ? Ask, and you shall have ; seek, 
and you shall find ; knock, and it shall be opened unto 
you. The fervent prayer of a just man is of great avail. 
Intellectually speaking, it is very hard to believe in prayer ; 
but let us spend but one week in the real earnest service 
of God and the exercise of a spiritual life, and the fact, 
and far more than we ever surmised to be the fact, will lie 
before us bright beyond the brilliance of any human de- 
monstrations. All experience concurs with God^s written 
word to tell us that the immutable is changed by prayer. 
The saints turn aside the great universal laws of nature by 
the blow of an ejaculation. Even the unexpressed will of 
a soul in union with God is a power with the omnipotent 
Creator, and looks like what it cannot be, a limit to His 
liberty. And this is always in our reach, instant, light- 
ning-like, peremptory, and efficacious ; and on its way to 
heaven it unites itself with the prayer of Jesus upon earth, 
with the intercessions of Mary, with the appeals of all the 
saints, and the earnest outcries and entreaties of the wide 
militant Church on earth, and thus, like a beautiful storm 
of supplication, like a loud-voiced litany of all creation, it 
breaks round the throne of God with majestic power, and 
the echo is heard in our hearts almost before the inward 
prayer is breathed, and the words of blustering temptation 



292 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

are hushed within, and the bigs drops of the impetuous 
rain of grace are falling thick and fast upon us. Ah ! it 
will be one of the joys of heaven to learn the secret of the 
power of prayer. But now it is a great abyss to the rocky 
edge of which we climb and look over, and all is sonorous 
darkness, and we turn giddy, and recover not our senses 
until we kneel down and adore the one only supreme, in- 
finitely lovely, and unspeakably adorable will of God. 

Even dead things have a wizard life put into them, and 
help us on our road to heaven. And dumb things have a 
voice, and inanimate things lay strong hands on us, and 
turn us round to God. The Spirit of God is hiding every- 
where, so that the world is an enchanted place, and all the 
enchantment is for God. Books, sermons, services, scenery, 
and the examples of those around us, sorrows, joys, hopes, 
fears, winds and waves, heat and cold, animals and plants 
— strange powers are touching them at unexpected mo- 
ments, and they electrify us with thoughts of God, nay 
often with keen contacts of His presence. All these things 
teach us one truth, and that one truth is in itself an amaz- 
ing help, that it is the will of God to each one of us that 
we should be saved eternally. And are not all the chances 
blessedly in favour of the accomplishment of that dear 
Will? 

We have already considered the sacraments of baptism, 
penance, and the eucharist. But there are other sacraments 
which deserve special notice as auxiliaries to us in the 
work of our salvation. Just when boyhood is taking us 
out into the world, and when the first-fruits of our young 
independence are at once so dangerous and so dear, the 
sacrament of confirmation steps in, seals up the grace of 
our baptism, fills us with the one grace which at that sea- 
son we need above all others, the gift of fortitude, tries to 
be beforehand with the world, and enrols us in the actual 
militia of God, so that, in addition to our former character 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 293 

of His sons, we have now the further character of being 
His soldiers, and are placed in a peculiar way under the 
light, the guidance, and the love of the Third Person of the 
Most Holy Trinity. Nothing can be more opportune or 
more complete than this sacrament of force. 

There are few sources of grace in life more plentiful 
than marriage, both because of the abundance of its joys, 
and also because of its innumerable retinue of trials. It 
makes or mars the happiness of the majority of men, and 
it is one of the most active powers on earth in fostering or 
in frustrating the work of God within the soul. Now that 
we are used to the thought, it seems most natural and fit- 
ting that our Lord should have exalted this domestic con- 
tract to the exceeding dignity of a Christian sacrament. 
Yet, beforehand, who would have dreamed of such a thing? 
And possibly the souls are countless whom this very sacra- 
ment has saved, and whom the state of life would have been 
more likely to ruin than to save, had it not been for its 
sacramental grace. In no respect does religion so boldly 
encroach upon the world as in making marriage a sacra- 
ment ; it is almost the longest reach and the most deter- 
mined grasp of our sweet Saviour's arm, when He was bent 
to rescue His dear souls from the fiery ordeal of the world. 
Death too with its unknown necessities, must have a sacra- 
ment which it can call its own, as well to finish the demo- 
lition of sin, as to anoint the failing warrior with a hea- 
venly unguent for his last dire combat, and enable him in 
defiance of earthly calculations to elude the hold which the 
unseen powers of evil lay upon him in that hour. If we 
ever need help, will it not be in that dreadful agony, for 
neither earthly love nor earthly power can help us then? 
With many, doubtless, the battle has gone hard, though they 
who stood around neither heard nor saw the mortal wrestle, 
and with many it was the secret strength of that holy oil, 
the hidden operation of that sacramental grace, which 

z2 



294 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

turned the scale, and consigned to the Good Shepherd's 
arm that sheep which is now His own for ever. Must not 
God mean us to be saved, when there is not a conjuncture 
in our fortune, not a winding in the road of life, but at the 
turn we find Him waiting with some strange beautiful in- 
vention of love, the very mechanism of which none but an 
all-wise artist could have contrived ? 

The supernatural power, which God confers upon virtu- 
ous actions, is also a remarkable assistance to us in the 
work of our salvation. It is like adding power a hundred- 
fold to the machines and tools of the mechanic. And here 
again God does not look to the importance or solemnity of 
the action, but to the purity of intention with which it is 
performed. Each pious act, however trivial, has three 
supernatural forces bestowed upon it. There is, first of all, 
the force of impetration by which, even while we are uncon- 
scious and forgetful of it, our prayers acquire a new vigor 
and exercise a greater influence over the adorable Will 
of God. When we consider how much we want from 
Him, and how almost our whole life must needs be 
spent in the attitude of petition, even when we are 
not formally and directly praying, when we reflect how 
our very vileness is an incessant supplication to the great- 
ness of our Creator, we shall see how this mysterious power 
of impetration, hung upon our lives, must aid us in attain- 
ing heaven. Of ourselves it would seem as if we were the 
most unlikely creatures to be heard, relapsed rebels against 
the majesty of God, and even when we return to our duty, 
surrendering only on jealous conditions, and with a hun- 
dred mean reserves. But this power of impetration makes 
us really worthy to be heard, and is a sort of invisible 
beauty glowing in our lives on earth, anticipating that con- 
summate loveliness which gives the interceding saints such 
power in heaven. 

Not less wonderful is the power of meriting which grace 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 295 

communicates to our good works, as though the Heart of 
Jesus were supposed to animate each one of them, and the 
infinite worth of His Precious Blood were secretly folded 
up within them. "We have seen how magnificent the re- 
wards of heaven are, and yet one obscure and momentary 
good work, full of the love of God, and fair to look at because 
of the purity of its intention, has only to settle but for one 
instant upon the cross of Christ and thence wing its way to 
heaven, where its merit has such transcending power as to 
pass the guards and open the gates of the citadel of the 
King of kings. See then in what a condition this places 
us as regards our salvation. Earth is strewn so thickly 
with the materials of meriting, that all day long we have 
nothing to do but to gather them up in armsful, as the 
poor gather firewood in the forest, and even with less toil 
than theirs. Grace is superabundant and incessant and 
universal. • We can hardly get out of the way of it, if we 
are perverse enough to try. The process of touching our 
materials with this heavenly grace is so easy and simple, 
that by use it becomes almost natural to us, and except for 
the warm feeling of love in our hearts, we should in the 
great multitude of our actions, be almost unconscious of the 
process. So that from our waking in the morning till our 
falling asleep at night, we are throwing up the merest dust 
and ashes of earth to heaven, and it is stronger than the 
laws of its own material vileness, and rises thither, and is 
put into the divine treasury as the purest gold of Christian 
merit. 

But there is yet another mysterious power infused by 
grace into our actions, the power of satisfaction. Alas ! 
our sins are both tall and broad, and their malice deep and 
fearful, while the justice of God is sparkling intolerably 
and flashing with angry splendor in the light of His jea- 
lous and exacting sanctity. We have need to be calling 
every hour on the atoning Blood of Jesus ; for nothing 



296 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

short of that can satisfy for the guilt of sins to which 
eternal death is due. But through the merits of that same 
dear Saviour our own humblest actions can appease the 
wrath of God, can give Him real substantial satisfaction, 
can atone for the temporal punishments in store for our 
sinful past, and constrain, with such beautiful constraint! 
even His justice to give us orders on the treasury of His 
compassion. It would have been indeed a huge mercy, 
and to our unillumined sense a perfectly inexplicable one, 
had our Creator been pleased to let our works of penance, 
our aching fasts, our cold vigils, our burning disciplines, 
satisfy in some degree the claims of His high justice. But 
that we should be allowed to steep the slightest of our ordi- 
nary inconveniences, the trouble of getting up in the morn- 
ing, the coldness of the east wind, the heat of the summer 
sun, or the insignificant self-denial of a kind action, — that 
we should be allowed to steep these things in the Blood 
of the Incarnate Word, and make them strong, vigorous, 
and heaven-reaching satisfactions for our sins, is mar- 
vellous indeed. What then shall we say to the love 
which has made all our Christian actions, even those in 
which there is no inconvenience at all, nay still more, 
even those which are pleasures and privileges, such as 
mass, and benediction, and giving alms, and making the 
sign of the Cross, and reading the lives of saints, into 
solemn, serious, and efficacious satisfiictions for our sins ? 
Surely such a love as this, busy, inventive, ubiquitous, 
must be bent on saving us, and on saving us as nearly 
against our wills, as can be with our wills still free ! 

But He does more. The power of impetration gives us 
influence over Him for others as well as for ourselves. We 
can thus obtain gifts for them, which we could not give 
ourselves. The power of meriting is a personal privilege. 
Our merits are our own ; they cannot belong to another. 
The glory of heaven is inexhaustible, so that we may go on 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 297 

multiplying our merits, like our Blessed Lady, and yet we 
shall not drain the rewards of heaven. But strange to say ! 
we may do more than satisfy the justice of God for the tem- 
poral punishment of our own sins, whether that punishment 
consist of the withdrawal of the graces of repentance, or of 
the sorrows and calamities of life, or of the active fires of 
purgatory. We may have satisfactions to spare, satis- 
factions which may go into the treasury of the Church and 
supply materials for future indulgences, satisfactions which 
we may at once transfer to others, and God at once accepts 
the transfer, and bestows the grace, withholds the punish- 
ment, or alleviates the suffering, as the case may be. Nay, 
if He will, He allows us to alienate the satisfactions which 
we really need ourselves, and bestow them upon others, as 
an exercise of heroic charity towards our fellows, or of dis- 
interested generosity towards His glory ; so that we may 
not only save ourselves, but help Him also in His grand 
labor of saving the world which He created without any 
labor at all. He multiplies saviours, by making us 
saviours ourselves, at the very moment when He is also 
multiplying for us the means by which we are the more 
easily to save ourselves. 

But there is still a finishing stroke left to perfect this 
work of divinest art. There is what theologians call satis- 
passion. In other words, for Christ's sake,"^ and because 
nothing about men can escape the universal contagion of 
His redeeming grace, there is in mere suffering, in the 
simple pressure of pain, in the sheer tortures of mental 
anguish, in the very weight of labor and weariness of en- 
durance, a secret underground virtue which is not without 
its own peculiar acceptableness to the justice of God. It is 



* It is not meant here that there is not satispassion in the sufferings ol 
those who are not in a state of grace, or indeed of the heathen. Yet even 
this may be in some way for Christ's sake, and because of the Incarnation. 



298 THE EASINEiSS OF SALVATION. 

not that He loves to see His creatures suffer, it is not that 
His glory can feed itself on mere torments, which are 
but irregularities we have brought into His glad creation, 
and formed no part in the primeval plan of Him who 
is Himself an uncreated ocean of joy, a glorious abyss 
of unutterable beatitudes. His love gives an inward dig- 
nity even to the most inevitable suffering of the creature. 
Who can doubt that it is because of Christ, and the lumi- 
nous shadow of His redeeming Passion which falls with a 
soft light on every human woe and mortal pain, and so 
mellows them into that beautiful landscape of earth which 
God once looked at and blessed for its exceeding loveliness ? 
Thus He, who made Mary merit even while she slept, com- 
municates to us wretched sinners some faint similitude of 
that astonishing privilege. Even while we are concentra- 
ted in our sufferings, while pain absorbs us in itself or else 
distracts us by its vehemence, some sort of dumb sacrifice 
to the justice of our Creator is rising up from our clouded 
minds, as if our bed of pain were an altar to His purity, or 
our broken heart gave out a faint odor of Christ, or our 
aching limb were as cinnamon burning in the fire. 

Thus it is that divine love follows us everywhere with 
helps to our salvation. Thus it is that God's blessed will 
that we should all be saved bears down upon us with almost 
a tyranny of goodness, in order that we may not escape 
His eternal company in heaven. Down to teaching us how 
to make virtues of our necessities, down to the acceptance 
of the almost unreasonable sacrifice of satispassion, this will 
of God for our salvation persecutes us with the prodigality 
of its gifts. Why is it then that so many Christians go 
wrong and fail, so many more at least than ought to fail, 
even granting that all who fail are but comparatively few ? 
Is the difficulty of salvation the only answer to this melan- 
choly fact ? Have we not seen with our own eyes that it is 
not difficult? Does not experience teach us with children, 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 299 

and we are as children before God, nay does it not teach 
us with wise grown-up men, that tiiere are easy things in 
which disobedience will not obey ? The facility of a thing 
is sometimes a temptation to disobedience. So it will occa- 
sionally come across us in our meditations that God does 
Himself an injury by all this prodigality of His love, that 
He makes Himself too common, that He does not sufficiently 
stand upon His dignity, that He may miss of His end by 
the mere eagerness with which He pursues it, that He may 
hamper and embarrass generous souls who would run more 
freely if they were less encumbered with help, that His ex- 
uberance may be on the one hand a temptation to unbe- 
lief, and on the other an allurement to presumption. We 
know such thoughts are sins, if we deliberately entertain 
them ; and when we do not entertain them, then they are 
the broken, foolish, incoherent speech of men intoxicated 
with the wine of God^s love, whose very babblings tell 
what is working in their souls, and how the excesses 
of His goodness are perplexing them. He knows best; 
and we know Him sufficiently well to be assured that not 
one artifice of His compassion could be spared without the 
sacrifice of a multitude of souls, who are saved just by 
that one thing, that single special contrivance of creative 
love. 

If there are Christians who will not meditate upon eter- 
nal things, nor use the same rules of patience and discre- 
tion in the matter of salvation, which they use in temporal 
affairs, or if there are any who let evil habits master them, 
or if by a special wile of Satan they will not let themselves 
be brought within the influence of a priest, it is not because 
salvation is not easy, but because they will not comply with 
its indulgent requisitions. Some men speak as if salvation 
could not be easy, unless it actually destroyed free will, 
and carried them off to heaven by force. Yet in reality the 
love of God goes as near to this as it can do consistently 



800 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

-with free will ; so near that none but He could have gone 
so near, and yet avoided the destruction of it. What is it 
we would have ? Our benignant Creator has bewildered us 
with the rapid, intricate, enormous machinery of His love. 
He has not only outstripped our imagination, He has tried 
our faith. What more could we desire ? 

But salvation is not only easy in itself and because of its 
helps ; it is easy also because it is our interest. What in- 
terests us is by a law of our nature easy, and nothing inte- 
rests us so much as a thing in which our own welfare is 
manifestly and deeply involved. This will become evident 
to us if we compare the pleasures of sin with the pleasures 
of a state of grace. The pleasures of sin are not lasting. 
The fires go out for want of fuel. They only burnt brightly 
and swiftly at first because it was but dry weeds, thorns, 
and thistles, which supplied them. There is also a want 
of continuity in sinful pleasures. Sin is not pleasant to 
look back upon, as a good action is. It lives in excitement 
and moral intoxication. Its very vehemence makes it sub- 
ject to relapses. Somehow also the pleasure of sin wastes 
and devastates the spirit ; it blights our human afi"ections ; 
it scorches places in our hearts where green things were 
wont to grow, and unlike Christian suffering, it does not 
fertilize hereafter what it is burning now. It leaves behind 
it remorse which makes our whole life ache, and weariness 
which turns the very sunshine into a burden. It causes us 
to be peevish both with ourselves and others ; and to a 
peevish man his own company is more tedious than words 
can tell. At last bodily health fails, and our spirits give 
way beneath us ; for sin is the twin-brother of sickness. 
Worldly misfortune not seldom supervenes; and the loss 
of the respect of others is one of those losses which are 
almost inevitable to the sinful man. Most sinners also are 
ambitious in their own line, and they are cramped even in 
their means of sinning ; they cannot fulfil their own dreams 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 301 

of profligacy, nor sin upon the grand scale which they in- 
tended. Pain and sickness, which are always hard to bear, 
are desperately intolerable to a man who is not in a state 
of grace. They involve loss of time, waste of life, diminu- 
tion of pleasures, when all is so fleetiog, and sin so longs to 
catch each moment as it flies. Moreover they are so un- 
meaning, or what is worse, so purely penal to the wicked 
man. Then there is the slavish dread of death, or what is 
hardly a less sickening misery, the wild forced unbelief of 
the eternity which is beyond. In a word, a downright ha- 
bitual sinner is in the long run neither loved nor loving ; 
and if he does not lose the present world altogether, as well 
as the world which is to come, it is because the justice of 
His Creator pays him here for such natural kindliness and 
moral respectability as he may have shown. 

Now contrast all this with the delight of being in a state 
of grace. Is there any earthly joy like the sense of pardon? 
How deep it goes down into our nature, unlocking such 
secret fountains of tears as were far beyond the reach of 
ordinary hopes and fears ! There is also a satisfyingness 
about it, which seldom accompanies other joys. A void is 
filled up in our hearts, which had ached before. Peace 
comes where before there was a trouble of uncertain fears, 
and love awakens with a keener, fresher appetite for its 
obedient work for God. In prosperity, in adversity, in the 
love of others, in the enmity of others, in hard work, 
in old age, in sickness, and in death, the state of grace 
seems just to add what was needed, to supply that the ab- 
sence of which was regretted, to throw light upon the dark- 
ness or to subdue the glare, to level the rocks or fill in the 
sunken places, to drain what was marshy or irrigate what 
was dry. It has shed upon the whole of life repose, pleni- 
tude, satisfaction, contentment. It has positively given us 
this world, while it was in the act of transferring to us the 
other. And is not salvation easy, when it is our own pre- 

2a 



302 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

sent interest, our immediate reward, and downright earthly 
happiness to boot ? 

I do not think that, if we kept in view the perfections 
of God, we should venture to believe, unless the Church 
taught us, that there was in creation such a place as hell. 
When it has been revealed to us, we can perceive, not only 
its reasonableness, but also how admirably it is in keeping 
with the various attributes of God, and, not least of all, 
wdth the exquisiteness of Ilis mercy. There is an awful 
beauty about that kingdom of eternal chastisement ; there 
is a shadow cast upon its fires, which we admire even while 
we tremble, the shadow of the gigantic proportions of a 
justice which is omnipotent; there is an austere grandeur 
about the equity of God^s vindictive wrath, which makes 
us nestle closer to Him in love, even while we shudder at 
the vision. But to us who live and strive, who have grace 
given us, and yet have the power of resisting it ; who have 
room for penance, but are liable to relapse ; who are right 
now, but can at any time go wrong ; who can doubt that 
hell is a pure mercy, a thrilling admonition, a solemn pas- 
sage in God^s pathetic eloquence, pleading with us to save 
our souls and to go to Him in heaven ? There is no class 
of Christians to whom hell is not an assistance. The con- 
version of a sinner is never completed without the fear of 
hell. Otherwise, the work cannot be depended on. It has 
a flaw in its origin, a seed of decay in its very root. It is 
unstable and insecure. It is short-lived and unpersevering, 
like the seed in our Saviour^s parable, which fell upon a 
rock, sprung up for a season, and then withered away. 
Hell teaches us God, when we are too gross to learn Him 
otherwise. It lights up the depths of sin^s malignity, that 
we may look down, and tremble, and grow wise. Its fires 
turn to water, and quench the fiery darts of the tempter. 
They rage around us, so that we dare not rise up from 
prayer. Tliey follow us, like the many-tongued pursuing 



THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 303 

flames of a burning prairie, and drive us swiftly on, and 
out of breath, along the path of God's commandments. 
Hell ! thou desolate creation of eternal justice ! who ever 
thought of finding a friend in thee? Yet we cannot doubt 
but that hell has sent into heaven more than half as many 
souls as it contains itself. 

Even to those aiming at perfection, the thought of hell 
is an immense assistance. The common things of the faith 
are, in reality, far above all the high lights of the saints. 
There is no growing out of or beyond the ordinary motives 
and old truths of the faith, even for those who are most 
highly advanced, or are practising the most disinterested love. 
There is no habitual state in which the spiritual life can 
rest and stay itself up in those thin atmospheres. Besides 
which, there can be no bounds safely set to the self-distrust 
which the greatest saints should have, and are the most 
likely to have, of themselves. This being so, it is extremely 
desirable that even those who walk by love, and are aiming 
at perfection, should bring frequently before their minds 
the judgments of God, in the terrific severities of hell. 
There are times when we faint, and are inclined to relax 
our upward straining, our climbing of the steep mountain 
of God. Spiritual sweetnesses and periodical absences of 
temptation often unnerve us for fresh attacks of the Evil 
One. We come to do things in a slovenly and remiss way, 
from long habit. While we grow in merits, we are getting 
hugely into debt to the greatness and the multitude of God\s 
mercies, and this at times unsobers us. Moreover, sanctity 
cannot grow without there being also a growing apprecia- 
tion of the possible extremities of God^s justice. Neither 
is it an uncommon delusion to think that we are beyond 
the fears and impressions of the senses, though our softness 
in mortification ought to teach us better. Isext to a very 
clear and penetrating contemplation of the attributes of 
God, nothinor enables us to o-et a true hatred of sin more 



804 THE EASINESS OF SALVATION. 

than the horrible nature of its eternal punishments. In 
all these conjunctures, the frequent thought of hell is 
nothing less than an impulse heavenwards. The false 
delicacy of modern times, in keeping back the scaring 
images of hell, while, in the case of children, it has often 
marred a whole education, is a formidable danger to the 
sanctity as well as to the faith of men. 

If the terrors of the Lord contribute largely to the easi- 
ness of salvation, the attractiveness of His rewards has 
also saved its thousands and its tens of thousands. It is 
hard to disentangle the influence of the thought of heaven 
from the purity of disinterested love, and it is most unde- 
sirable even to attempt it. We want something to put out 
the beautiful light of earth, and to sully its fair shining. 
We need a disenchanting power in the midst of a creation 
so lovely, winning, and specially alluring to our own par- 
ticular selves, lest it should rob us of our hearts, and leave 
us nothing to give to God. We covet some unfading ideal 
so to possess our souls, that we may walk the world in the 
pure cold chastity of perfect detachment, so that God may 
be our all. The coruscations of His throne are sometimes 
too blinding to our eyes. That lofty region of perpetual 
thunders will sometimes stun us, when littleness and im- 
perfection have unstrung our spiritual nerves. If we see 
God now through a glass darkly, sometimes it must be 
through many earth-tinted glasses that our weak eyes must 
look at Him. Hence, the need to us of familiarizing our- 
selves with all that the schools teach us of the joys of 
heaven. Hence, the power which a simple soul acquires 
from reposing even on the undeveloped thought of the 
greatness of his Creator^s recompense. And what are all 
the joys of heaven, but the accidents, the corollaries, the 
overflows, of the radiant Beatific Vision ? So that pure 
love mingles with our blameless thoughts of self, and 
heaven is already a power on earth, drawing us with mag- 



THE EASINESS OF SALYATIOX. 305 

netic force into the spheres of its own abounding light; 
and what is heaven but the locality we give to that dear 
glory of our Incomprehensible and Omnipresert Father, 
in whose embrace we long to hide ourselves for love ? 

1 conclude, therefore, that God is bent on saving us, that 
salvation is easy in itself, easy because of its helps, easy 
because of the terrors of being lost, and easy because of 
the attractiveness of its own rewards. This is my answer 
to those who object to the picture I have drawn of God^s 
creative love. It is founded upon common truths which 
everybody knows, truths which strike us the more, the 
more by assiduous contemplation of His attributes we 
come to know the God to whom we belong. It is drawn 
from the distinct statements of scripture. It is in har- 
mony with the teaching of the saints. It is the doctrine 
most full of consolation for creatures. It is the belief 
most honorable to the Creator. 



20 2a2 



306 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 
Israel ! quam magna est domus Dei. — Baruch. 

It is sweet to think of the web of love which God is 
hourly weaving round every soul He has created on the 
earth. If we bring the world before us with all its pic- 
turesque geography, the many indentations of its coasts, 
the long courses of its fertile rivers, its outspread plains, 
its wide forests, its blue mountain chains, its aromatic 
islands, and its verdant archipelagos, it enlarges the heart 
to think how round every soul of man God is weaving that 
web of love. The busy European, the silent Oriental, the 
venturous American, the gross Hottentot, the bewildered 
Australian, the dark-souled Malay, — He comes to all. He 
has His own way with each ; but with all it is a way of 
tenderness, forbearance, and lavish generosity. The va- 
riety of their circumstances, and those are well nigh num- 
berless, are not so many as the varieties of His sedulous 
affection. The biography of each of those souls is a miracu- 
lous history of God's goodness. If we could read them, as 
probably the Blessed can, they w^ould teach us almost a new 
science of God, so wonderfully and inexhaustibly would 
they illuminate His different perfections. "VVe should see 
Him winding invisible threads of light and love even round 
the ferocious idolater. We should behold Him dealing 
with cases of the most brutal wickedness, the most fanati- 
cal delusion, the most stolid insensibility, and even for these 
arranging all things with the exquisite delicacy of creative 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 307 

love. But SO astonishing, so overwhelming is the flood of 
divine light, such and so vast the very ocean of eternal pre- 
dilection, which He has poured upon His Church, that all 
outside looks like utter darkness because of the dazzling 
excess of her magnificence. This blinds us so that we can- 
not see how what looks so dark to us is after all a true light, 
lightening every man that comes into the world. 

Let us turn our thoughts then to the Church. What a 
comfort it is to think of the vastness of the Church, and of 
her holiness ! There is the incessant action of those 
mighty Sacraments, and the whole planet transfigured with 
the daily Mass. There is all heaven busy, as if time was 
too short for it, with a hundred occupations for each Chris- 
tian soul, set in motion at that souFs request, or self-moved 
by gratuitous love and pity. Mary, Angels, Saints, and 
sufi"ering Souls in purgatory, all are hard at work. God is 
employed, as if His Sabbath after creation were long since 
past. There are sorrows to be soothed, temptations to be 
banished, sins to be forgiven, tears to be dried, pains to be 
healed, good works to be assisted, death-beds to be at- 
tended ; and the bright throngs in heaven, like some reli- 
gious Order of Mercy, are busy at them all. happy we ! 
on whom all this dear diligence is thus perpetually ex- 
pended! 

What is the fruit of it all ? If salvation is easy, and sal- 
vation is preached in the Church of Christ, then it ought to 
follow that the great majority of catholics are saved. We 
need speak only of catholics. We will not advert, however, 
distantly to those outside the Church. People tempt them- 
selves about them, and play tricks with their gift of faith, 
for which they ought to be thanking God their whole 
lives long. We have no business to concern ourselves 
with God's relations to others : however wistfully the ties 
of love may make us gaze upon that dark abyss. We are 
catholics. Let us be content with speculating about our- 



308 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

selves. We will suppose, therefore, the objection to be 
made, that if salvation is easy, then practically we ought 
to find that most catholics are saved. It is not enough to 
say that though salvation is easy, the corruption of man 
is so tremendous that little comes of it ; for then it seems a 
question of words to call salvation easy. Salvation is the 
saving of fallen man, and, therefore, to be really easy, it 
must far more than counterbalance his corruption. The 
question is one of too momentous a character, of too thril- 
ling an interest, for us to be content with mere rhetoric. 
We repeat. If salvation is easy, most catholics must be 
saved. Can we venture to say that such is our belief? 

Before answering so abrupt a question, we must be 
allowed a few words of prelude. You are asking us what 
we think about one of God's secrets, a secret which He has 
reserved to Himself. It is one of those questions into which 
we may venture reverently to enquire, in the hope of find- 
ing fresh traces of His omnipresent love : but for no other 
reason than this. We may enquire that Ave may love ; we 
may not enquire that we may know. It does not seem 
that we anger Him by such an investigation, provided we 
are humble. But we must remember we can decide no- 
thing. After all our surmises, inferences, and guesses, the 
truth remains, as it was before, hidden with God. We 
have, however, in spite of much natural reluctance, a rea- 
son for entering into it, which seems to constrain us to it 
as to a work of mercy. Outside the Church the dread- 
ful error of the day, which is ravaging the hearts of men, 
is a forgetfulness that they are creatures. They seem in a 
certain way to remember the Creator, but, as was said in 
the first chapter, in politics, in science, in literature, in all 
the departments of the world's greatness, they seem not to 
realize that they are creatures. Now this error reaches 
faintly and feebly into the hearts of true believers. There 
is always in the Church a kind of evil echo of the noise 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 309 

which rlio ^yorld is makinoi; without. But it is not more 
than an echo. Hence the spiritual physicians of the times 
come across an unusual amount of suffering, which good 
souls feel, from doubts about their relations with God, 
questionings of His justice and His goodness which will 
hardly be silenced, and which it were wild work, and al- 
most ruin, to try to silence by main force. Such men find 
a difficulty in their most intimate religious life, for which 
we can think of no name. It is not simply temptatioa 
against the faith. It is not a disgust with the spiritual life. 
It does not seem to rest in the will at all, but in some per- 
versity of the mind which is so humble that it is a shame 
to call it by so hard a name as perversity. We believe it to 
be an habitual incapacity of realizing that they are crea- 
tures, in the full truth and all the bearings of that idea. 
The inability might be brought on in these days by much 
and incautious reading of newspapers, or by an absorbing 
interest in the politics of the day, or by being mixed up 
with the existing commercial system of the world, or by not 
having always been catholics, or by having misused the 
first graces of conversion, or from sheer want of generosity 
with God. But it is a shadow, or an echo, or a taint in the 
believer\s heart, of the prevailing pestilence of modern so- 
ciety. Just as in the presence of a cognizable plague we 
have frequently a mild form of some congenial disease, so 
does the sickness of the times infect even many of the faith- 
ful with a languor of a somewhat similar description. It 
is because I have been called to so many cases of this sort, 
that I have composed the present treatise, happy if I may 
be allowed to console one afflicted brother, or to ease one 
tempted soul, or to enlighten one bewildered mind, more 
happy than I can say if I can get from one of the creatures, 
whom He loves so well, an additional degree of love for our 
compassionate Creator. 

It may be said that the view contained in the preceding 



310 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

chapters is taking God's side exclusively, and putting for- 
ward only a one-sided statement. But this is not really 
true ; however vre are not concerned to argue the point. 
We look only to a practical result. But what in truth is it 
"which forms the chief part of the suffering to the souls just 
now described ? It is that they will obstinately look only 
at one side of the question, and the side which co;' cerns 
them least, instead of that which concerns them most, as 
that w^hich God puts before them ; and that they will per- 
tinaciously extend the difficulty by bringing in a number 
of problems, in the solution of which they individually 
have no interest at all, and which they can hardly investi- 
gate, at least in their temper of mind, without forgetting 
what is due to God. They seem to have no eye, except for 
dark possibilities. They have a morbid hankering to climb 
giddy heights, to loiter on the edge of precipices, to balance 
themselves on the craters of volcanoes. They who love 
danger shall perish in it. We had better let God's thunder- 
bolts alone, and not meddle with them, were it even to feel 
the sharpness of their fiery points. We only ask these poor 
sufferers now to look at the other side of the question ; and 
not only to look at it, but to pray about it, and meditate on 
it, and familiarize themselves with it. Mere reading is no- 
thing. A religious enquiry without prayer is a mockery 
of God. We can define nothing. We can unriddle none 
of God's secrets. But these souls have fed on gloomy con- 
siderations until they are almost poisoned. Now let us in- 
vite them to follow us patiently through the brighter consi- 
derations which commend themselves to an opposite temper 
and disposition, and which if not of greater weight than 
their own views, are at least of equal authority with theirs, 
besides the additional recommendation of their sunshine. 

With this prefatory caution and admonition we may pro- 
ceed therefore to answer the question thus: — We are in- 
clined to believe, that most catholics are ultimately saved. 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 311 

Of course we do not know it, and we do not wish to know 
it. But as the objection is started, we look attentively at 
the Church as fiir as we have the power, and the result of 
our observations is, that to the best of our belief the great 
majority of her children save their souls. We will give our 
reasons, one by one, for this conclusion, begging the reader 
once more to remember that we are not laying down the 
law, and that the necessities of many souls have beguiled 
us into an enquiry, upon which of ourselves we should never 
have dreamed of entering.^ 

There seems to be a sort of dishonesty in putting forward 
the view which is to occupy this chapter, without confessing 
that the authority of theologians, so far as there can be any 
authority in a question of this nature, is upon the whole on 
the other side, while the authority of Scripture seems to be 
with us. Very many writers appear to hold that the num- 
ber of the reprobate very far exceeds the number of the 
saved, not only taking the heathen into account, but taking 
heretics into account also — and not only taking heretics 

* Lest it should be supposed that there was anything unusual in discuss- 
ing this question in a practical and popular book, I would venture to remind 
him that it has been the common practice of catholic writers, both in Italy, 
France, and England. Among preachers we have Massillon, Bourdaloue, Le 
Jeune, Lacordaire, Segneri. the Blessed Leonard of Port Maurice, and indeed 
almost all Italian Quaresimali. treating of the subject in the most alarming 
way. In practical and popular treatises, for reading, we have Drexelius, 
Bellarmine, Recupitus, D'Argentan, Bossuet in his 3Ieditations, Bail, Da 
Pont€, and our own Challoner, whose meditations have been translated into 
various languages. In Catechisms we have Lipsin. Turlot, who is translated 
into various languages, and the excellent Dr. Hay. Turlot asks why preachers 
do not often teach, often explain, often inculcate this? And he remarks, 
Q.uasstio haec (de numero salvandorum) non minus est utilis quam curiosa. 
Also the Tesori di confidenza in Dio, published at Rome by the Propaganda 
press, in 1840, discusses the question at great length. Parte Seconda, p. 316. 
This last book, it is important to add, is on the side of the question urged in 
this chapter; it is important, considering 1. the date of the book, 2. the plac© 
of its publication. 3. the press from which it issues, 4. its scriptural character, 
and 5. its popular style, and its being written in the vernacular. 



312 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

into account, but also the baptized infants of the faithful, 
whose deaths are said nearly to equal those of adult catho- 
lics, and also the infants of heretics who have received 
baptism ; so that, in their view, the question is narrowed 
to adult catholics, and of these, perhaps most writers ven- 
ture to say that onl^^ a minority are saved. Recupitus, the 
Jesuit, in his treatise on the Number of the Predestinate, 
enumerates Lyra, Denys the Carthusian, Maldonatus, 
Cajetan, Bellarmine, Fasolus, Alvarez, Ruiz, Smising, 
Drexelius, and perhaps Molina, as holding this opinion, 
together with most of the Fathers of the Church. Sylvester, 
Carthagena, Granadus, Franciscus de Christo, are quoted 
on the other side. Suarez, who on the whole seems to be 
on the milder side, expressly includes the infants, and so 
does Lorinus, in his commentary on the hundred and thirty- 
eighth psalm. "^ 

Cajetan, expounding the parable of the virgins, teaches 
that even of those who live moderately well in the Church, 
and take a certain amount of care of their consciences, one 
half are lost. Suarez stigmatizes this opinion as *' exceed- 
ingly rigorous." He then says, "It is a doubtful matter, 
but I think a distinction should be made. By the name of 
Christians we may understand all those who glory in the 
name of Christ, and profess to believe in Him, although 
many of them are heretics, apostates, and schismatics. 
Now speaking in this way it seems to me probable that the 
greater part of them are reprobate, and it is in this general 
way that I understand the less mild opinion. Now as 
heretics and apostates have always been very numerous, if 
we add to them the number of the faithful who make bad 
deaths, the two together will plainly exceed the number of 
those who die well. But if by Christians we understand 
those only who die in the Catholic Church, it seems to me 
more likely, in the law of grace, that the greater number 

^- Kecupituci de num. pr^edci!. cap, ii. iii. 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 313 

of them are saved. The reason is, because, first of all, of 
those who die before they are adults, the great uiultitude 
die baptized ; and as to the adults, although the majority 
of men often sin mortally, yet they often rise again from 
sin, and thus pass their lives rising and falling. Then 
again there are but few, who are not prepared for death by 
the Sacraments, and grieve for their sins at least by attri- 
tion ; and this is enough to justify them at that time, and 
after their justification, the time left them is so short that 
they can easily persevere, and do so, without any fresh 
mortal sin. Therefore, all things considered, it is probable 
that the majority of Christians in this stricter sense are 
saved. ^' ^ 

Vasquez considers it clear from Scripture that the 
number of the lost is greater than the number of the 
saved ; but he adds that there may be a doubt about the 
faithful, and that some piously think that the majority of 
them are saved, and that the Sacraments of the Church, as 
well as the parable of the wedding garment, look that way. 
He himself however refuses to take either side.f Even 
Billuart Avill not allow to the theologians quoted by 
Recupitus any more certain foundations for their opinion 
than for that of their adversaries, J Cornelius a Lapide 
argues at length against the benignant conclusion of 
SuareZ; and says that the greater number of living theolo- 
gians at Rome in his day thought the general laxity of 
morals in the world a strong proof that the sterner opinion 
was also the more correct. § The Blessed Leonard of Port 
Maurice maintains, in his sermon for the third Sunday in 
Lent, that a great number of Christians are lost, because 

* Suarez, lib. 6. De comparat. pracdest. cap. 3, n. 6. 

t Vasq. in prim am partem disp. 101. cap. -i. 

X Billuart, Be certitud. praedest. diss. 9. art. 7. 

§ For the argument of the fewuess of the saved taken from the Fathers, 
see a dismal work published atKome in 1752, entitled Fogginius de paucitate 
adultorum fidelium salvandorum. 

2b 



314 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

their confessions are null through want of true sorrow.* 
St. Alphonso on the contrary says, in his Istruzione al pre- 
dicatori, that he holds it for certain that of all those who 
come to the sermons at a mission, whosoever should die 
within a year, would with difficulty be lost.f 

According to the rigid view, if the deceased baptized 
infants of the faithful, together with the deceased baptized 
infants of heretics, added to the adult Catholics who are 
saved, do not make a majority, and if also the statement 
be true % that the deaths of the children of catholics 
nearly equal in number, as Ruiz says, the deaths of adult 
catholics, then must the number of adults who are saved 
be so small, that it follows that the Church of the redeemed 
in heaven, the conquest of our Blessed Saviour's Precious 
Blood, is chiefly composed of children, of those who on 
earth never merited, never loved, never used their reason 
at all. Is not this a conclusion so repugnant as to be in- 
admissible ? 

F. Lacordaire has treated the subject with his usual 
power, and also with great delicacy, in his discourse on 
the results of the Divine Government, which forms part of 
his Conferences of 1851. He inclines to believe that a 
majority of mankind are saved, and dwells especially on 
children, women, and the poor. His exposition of the 
Scripture argument is very remarkable and ingenious, es- 
pecially his view of the text. Few are chosen,' from the 
light shed upon it by the context in the two places in 
which that passage occurs. Bergier, speaking of the 
number of the elect, says, "A solid and sufficiently in- 
structed mind will not allow itself to be shaken by a prob- 

^' Quaresimale , p. 195. 

t Difficilmente si danna. lettera seconda. 

t Le tiers des enfaDS meurt entre la premiere et la septieme annee de sa 
naissanco, plus de la moitie entre la premiere et la quatorzieme annee.— 
Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes. 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 315 

lematical opinion ;^' and again, after describing the dis- 
agreement of the Fathers and commentators on the subject, 
he adds, " If the parables of the Gospel might be taken as 
proofs, we should rather conclude that the greater, not the 
less, number would be saved. Jesus Christ compares the 
separation of the good and bad at the last judgment, to the 
division of the good grain from the cockle. Xow, in a 
field cultivated with care, the cockle is never more abun- 
dant than the wheat. He compares it to the separation of 
the bad fish from the good ; now to what fisher did it ever 
happen to take fewer good fish than bad? Of ten virgins 
called to the marriage five are admitted to the company of 
the spouse. In the parable of the talents two servants are 
recompensed, one only is punished ; in that of the feast, 
only one of the guests is rejected/'^ Da Ponte, in his 
treatise on Christian Perfection, seems also to lean to Ijie 
milder opinion ; and Lipsin, the Franciscan, in his catechism 
maintains that the opinion in favor of the majority of 
catholics being saved is the *' more probable," and more 
" consonant to the glory of God, the merits of Christ, and 
the hopes of men :^^f and Lipsin says expressly that he is 
speaking only of adults. 

The interpretation given by F. Lacordaire of the words, 
Many are called, but few are chosen, rests entirely on the 
two contexts in which the passage occurs. In the twentieth 
chapter of St. Matthew the kingdom of heaven is compared 
to a father of a family who hires laborers into his vineyard 
at successive hours of the day, and then when the evening 
comes, all are rewarded, and all receive the same reward, 
notwithstanding the inequalities of their time of labor. 
Those, who came early in the day, complain, and the 

* Bergier. Dist. Theol, au mot. Elus. Traite de la Vraie Religion, t. 10, p^ 
355. Lacordaire, Conferences, iv. 168. 

t Da Ponte, De Perfect Christiana, tr. i. Lipsin, Catech. Histor. Theolog. 
Dogmat. p. 446. De numero salyandorum. 



316 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

master answers that he has given them what he agreed 
to give, that he has a right to do what he likes with 
his own, that the last shall be first and the first last, 
and that many are called, but few chosen. Now it is 
clear that the difficulty of this parable does not consist 
in the small number who are recompensed, but in the ine- 
quality of the recompense. The conclusion, that there are 
but few who are saved, would have no connection whatever 
with the parable. It seems rather to mean that many, who 
are called by a common grace, from being the first become 
the last, while a few, who are chosen by a special grace, 
from being last become first. In the twenty-second chapter 
of the same Gospel, the kingdom of heaven is compared to 
a king who makes a marriage-feast for his son. The guests 
refuse to come. Whereupon the king sends his servants 
out into the highways and byeways to bring in a mixed 
multitude to the feast. Of all these only one is rejected; 
and that, because he has not on a wedding garment. Cast 
him out, says the king, into the darkness where there is 
weeping and gnashing of teeth, for many are called but few 
are chosen. Now here again the difficulty of the parable 
cannot consist in the few who are definitely admitted and 
remain to enjoy the feast; for, miscellaneous multitude as 
they are, there is but one rejected. If in such circum- 
stances as these, it is said that many are called, but few 
chosen, what can it mean but that there are few who re- 
ceive such a special grace as permits them to behave with 
more familiarity than others in divine things, or to count 
on an unusual favor of God in their regard? It is the 
temptation of some, says the great Dominican, who are 
called as it were by chance upon the highway of life to re- 
replace other guests who were invited and have not come, 
to persuade themselves that they are the objects of God^s 
special predilection, and to neglect to make their calling 
sure by an exact fidelity; and it is our Lord^s object in this 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 317 

parable to teach them, that if on the one hand there are 
last who become first, on the other hand no man must dare 
to presume it of himself,^ 

Here is a whole mass of conflicting opinions, not perhaps 
very clear. Let us now do the best we can to collect the 
suffrages of theologians in this matter. The controversy 
seems to stand in some such attitude as this : — 

1. Many writers hold that the majority of mankind will 
be lost, because heathen, and unbelievers, and heretics 
make up a majority. 

2. Some hold that a majority of all mankind, taking 
heathen, heretics, and Christians in one mass, will be 
saved. 

* Salmeron (t. vii. tr. 33) and Cornelius k Lapide (on Matt, xx.) give similar 
interpretations. Cornelius h Lapide says many are called .to ordinary grace 
and the observance of the commandments, and few to the observance of the 
counsels. Bergier, in his treatise de la Religion, quoted as a note in Migne's 
edition of the same author's dictionary, says, "Parmi les commentateurs, 
point d'uniformite. Pour ne parler que des catholiques, Cajetan, Mariana, 
Tostat, Luc de Bruges, Maldonat, Corneille de la Pierre, Menochius, le pere 
de Picquigny, admettent I'une et I'autre explication ; entendent par elus ou 
les hommes saues, ou les fideles. Jansenius de Gand pense que ce dernier 
sens est le plus naturel : Stapleton le soutient contra Calvin ; Sacy, dans ses 
Cowm€«totVe^.juge que c'estle sens litteral; dom Calmet semble lui donner 
la preference. Euthymius n'en donne point d'autre; il suivait S. Jean Chry- 
sostome. Le pere Hardouin soutient que c'est le seul sens qui s'accorde avec 
la suite du texte ; le pere Berruyer exclut aussi tout autre sens ; c'est pour 
cela qu'il a ete condamne, mais la faculte de theologie n'a certainment pas 
voulu censurer les interpretes catholiques que nous venons de citer, et ils 
sont suivis par beaucoup d'autres. Quel dogme pent on fonder sur un pas- 
sage susceptible de deux sens si differents ? And again he says, Pour fixer 
un peu plus cette discussion, nous disons qu'il y a trois opinions sur le nom- 
bre des catholiques predestines. Quelques docteurs pensent qu'il y aura plus 
de catholiques elus que de reprouves ; ils se fondent sur ce qu'il n'y a eu 
qu'un seul convive exclu du banquet nuptial. D'autres croient qu'il y aura 
autant de reprouv6s que d'elus. Ils se fondent sur le parable des Vierges, 
dont cinq etaient sages et cinq folles. — La plupart des theologiens enseignent 
qu'il y aura plus de reprouves que d'elus. lis s'appuient sur ces paroles : 
Pcnici vero electi. II n'y a done rien de certain k ce sujet. Le savant Suares 
regarde la premiere comme plus probable. 

2b2 



318 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

3. Some, to enhance their rio;orous view, maintain that 
the children are to be taken into the account, and yet even 
so a majority of mankind will be lost, or, in other words, 
that very few adults will be saved. 

4. Some, to enhance their mild views, maintain that the 
children may be put out of the reckoning, and yet that even 
so a majority of mankind will be saved. 

5. None of these views regard Catholics exclusively. 

6. Of those writers who regard Catholics exclusively, 
some maintain, that, even taking the children into account, 
the majority will be lost. 

7. Others maintain, that the majority will be saved, but 
the majority is only to be reached by reckoning in the 
children : this is perhaps the most common view of all. 

8. Others hold, that looking at adult Catholics only, as 
many will be lost as are saved ; this opinion is founded on 
the Parable of the Virgins. 

9. Others teach, that the far greater majority of adult 
Catholics will be lost. 

10. Others think, that a small majority of adult Catholics 
will be saved. 

' 11. Others finally, to whose opinion I strongly adhere 
myself, believe that the great majority of adult Catholics, 
perhaps nearly all of them, will be saved. 

12. In point of theologians, the rigorous opinions regard- 
ing the whole mass of mankind have an overwhelming 
authority. 

13. The rigorous opinions concerning the damnation 
of the majority of adult Catholics have more theologians on 
their side than the milder view. 

14. But if we subtract moral, ascetical, and hortatory 
authors, who write to rouse and to impress their readers, 
and retain only pure theologians in the stricter sense, I 
think the authorities on the two sides will be not far from 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 319 

evenly balanced, the excess being however in favor of the 
rigorous views. 

15. The more recent theologians also exhibit a leaning 
to the milder view ; and in many cases the rigorous views 
are held in conjunction with opinions on the ultimate state 
of unbaptized infants, which probably no single Catholic in 
the church now-a-days would hesitate to disclaim. 

16. Some of the authorities on the milder side are of very 
great weight. 

17. In the use of the Scripture argument the triumph is 
completely, and most remarkably, on the milder side. In- 
deed, the Scripture proof seems quite unmanageable in the 
hands of the rigorists. 

Thus then it appears, that the question is completely an 
open one, and that the view, which is to occupy this chap- 
ter, is not only lawful, but pious. Nevertheless, if I could 
persuade myself that the discussion had but little practical 
bearing on a holy life, I should eagerly avoid entering upon 
it. It seems, however, as if the inquisitive infidelity of the 
day had so far touched the faith of many good men, that 
questions have been started in their thoughts which mere 
contempt cannot now put to silence, and that in order to 
restore to their diseased minds a more true view of the 
fatherly character of God, it is necessary to bring before 
them distinct considerations, founded upon what we know 
of Him, in opposition to those darker reflections which 
keep them back from a cordial surrender of themselves 
to God, and which even when they are true, become untrue 
by claiming to be exclusive. Begging then of God to bless 
this inquir}^ concerning a secret, which for our good as well 
as His own glory He has hidden from us, let us proceed 
reluctantly upon our way. 

We know well that, when men judge others, whether 
in<lividuals or multitudes, they generally come to an erro- 
neous conclusion, from the mere fact that they judge over- 



320 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

harshly. It is part of the evil that is in us, to put the 
worst construction upon what we see, and to make no 
allowance for the hidden good. Moreover, we, unwittingly 
almost, judge by the worst parts of our own disposition, 
not by the best. We believe our evil to be common to all, 
and our good peculiar to ourselves. We consider evil a 
decisive test, while good is only allowed to establish a 
possibility. This is our rule for others : we reverse it for 
ourselves. We also find that our judgments get milder in 
proportion to the increase of our own strictness. The 
judgments of holy men sometimes astonish us by their 
laxity, while men, not even frequenting the sacraments, or 
in any way professing to be religious, will be scandalized 
by the least look of worldliness in a priest or a religious. 
They will detect, with the most amazing sensitiveness, the 
slightest inconsistency in the practice of an openly devout 
person. Thus, we may lay it down as a rule, that the 
severity of our judgments of others, even where judgments 
are legitimate and unavoidable, is an infallible index of the 
lowness of our own spiritual state. The more severe we 
are, the lower we are. We must, therefore, be on our 
guard against this well-known infirmity, in the present 
inquiry. There is something in the adorable compassion 
of God which looks like voluntary blindness. He seems 
either not to see, or not to appreciate, the utter unworthi- 
ness of men ; at least. He goes on His way with men as 
though He did not see it. The Bible is full of instances 
of this. Now, the more we are with God, and the closer 
our union with Him is, the more shall we catch something 
of a similar spirit, which will destroy the natural keenness 
of our detection of evil, and control more materially our 
judgments of our fellow-men. 

We must be careful, also, to make a distinction which is 
often forgotten, and which bears directly upon the present 
question. What we see around us, among catholics, may 



THE GREAT MASS OP BELIEVERS. 321 

be far from satisfactory; and the authentic statistics which 
reach us from catholic countries, may contain much that is 
unhappy and disheartening. Yet we must distinguish, at 
any given moment, between catholics not living so as to be 
saved, and their not being ultimately saved at last. In 
other words, we cannot go altogether by what we see. 
Immense numbers are converted, and go to the sacraments, 
and persevere in their new life ; and then they are less 
prominent. We do not hear of them. The statistics of 
Easters, jubilees, retreats, missions, and the like, come less 
under our notice than statistics of crime or misery. Sin 
strikes us, and is startling ; whereas, ordinary goodness is 
a tame affair, and passes unobserved. Then there are 
multitudes of men who have an exceedingly bad chapter 
in their lives, some ten or twenty years of wickedness, and 
then change, as if the volcanic matter in them had burned 
out. This is what men lightly call sowing their wild oats. 
As one set of these men passes into a better state, another 
is succeeding them ; so that the appearance of things is an 
incessant current of headstrong sin, sweeping all before it, 
unredeemed by the hopeful features of the case which the 
succession of sinners hides effectually from our view. 
Moreover, old age withdraws its thousands of actors from 
the stage of sin, and so they disappear from view. It is 
wretched enough to think of these conversions of old age, 
which seem to have more of nature in them than of grace. 
A man's passions are worked out. He becomes a moral 
wreck. The avenues of sensual pleasure are closed to him, 
by the aches and pains and dull insensibilities of age. In 
a number of cases, the very powers of sinning are dimin- 
ished. And so, what with fear, what with disgust, and 
what with making a virtue of necessity, the old man gives 
himself to God, such little of him as is left, and God 
accepts the gift. It is not for us to criticise this amazing 
forbearance of God: who knows if we may not one day 
21 



822 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEYERS. 

stand in need of it ourselves ? But so it is. It is God's 
affair ; and in His infinite wisdom He is pleased to take the 
offering, and to save the soul. Multitudes, again, even 
before old age, fall into sickness, in the prime of life and 
the middle of their sins, and they pass out of the outer 
\vorld of men into the inner world of the priest, that world 
half visible and half invisible, where daily miracles of 
grace are wrought, and where the weary minister of God 
is forever drawing those earthly consolations which are 
more to him than the dearness of domestic affections, and 
support him sweetly in his incessant toils. God partly 
admits him to His secrets, and takes him into the inner 
room of sickness, and shows him the machinery of salva- 
tion doing its finest and most hidden work. 

While we are gazing at this picture, we must not forget 
to realize (and it is no easy matter) what we have seen in 
a former chapter, how little God actually requires as abso- 
lutely indispensable to salvation. One confession at the 
hour of death, ordinary fidelity in confessing, a purpose 
of amendment which has no temptation then to be insin- 
cere, a very moderate sorrow, with huge allowances made 
for the clouded weariness and distracting unsettlements of 
pain, and the soul that has spent close upon a century of 
sin is saved, saved because God puts the requisites for 
absolution so low, saved because by His merciful ordinance 
faith survived grace for all those years, saved because the 
Precious Blood of Jesus is such a superabundant ransom, 
such a mighty conqueror of souls. When a man is con- 
verted, he has to make little outward change, so far as the 
eyes of men are concerned, in his ordinary life. Few will 
notice that he has begun to go to mass. Few see him enter 
the confessional, or kneel at the altar rail. Men are never 
very sedulous in finding out good, and it will even be some 
time before it is perceived that habits of swearing, or lying, 
or intemperance, are gone, or that violence of temper has 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 323 

passed away. Moreover, the convert has relapses, and 
somehovr these are always very much seen and noticed, 
and they conceal completely the gradual formation of a 
virtuous habit; and, besides this, a great deal which is 
externally disagreeable, and also morally unworthy, will 
remain, and almost hide a man's conversion even from his 
wife and child. It is not, generally, mortal sin which 
makes men so unbearable to others. It is more often sel- 
fishness, and temper, and churlishness, and ferocity, and 
coarseness, and such like, which may all be far short of 
mortal sin, or, in the cases of rude persons, of any sin at 
all. There is, also, much in the demeanor of a converted 
sinner which is very puzzling. He has had certain habits 
of sin ; and, though he no longer falls into the mortal sins 
in question, he has ways about him which simulate the old 
habit of sin. He talks as if he was still under its domi- 
nion. He omits things which a man would characteristi- 
cally omit, if he had such a habit. He even falls into 
venial sins congenial to the old habit ; and it may often 
happen that it shall look as if outward circumstances alone 
prevented his positively committing the old mortal sin. But 
it would be endless to enumerate all the things which baffle 
our judgment of the insincerity of a man's conversion. We 
may depend upon it, that, in a thousand spots which look 
desert, waste, and fire-blackened, God's mercy is finding 
pasture for His glory. 

It is very observable that evil is of its own nature much 
more visible than good, while goodness is invisible like 
God. Evil, like the world, is loud, rude, anxious, hurried, 
and ever acting on the defensive ; w^hile goodness partakes 
of the nature of Him who alone is truly good. It imitates 
His ways of secresy and concealment, and is impregnated 
with His Spirit of unostentatious tranquillity and self-suffi- 
cient contentment. The infuriated mob that burns down a 
church, and tramples the Blessed Sacrament under foot, is 



324 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

a much more obvious and obtrusive phenomenon than the 
dozen Carmelite nuns who have been doing the vrorld's 
hardest vrork for it before that tabernacle door for years. 
The whole priesthood of the Church, busy at its work of 
mercy, catches the eye much less than a single regiment 
in scarlet, marching down upon its fellow Christians. Even 
in the individual this invisible character of goodness is 
perceptible, and that not merely in the shy spirit and 
instinctive bashfulness of great sanctity, but even without 
a man's intending it, or being aware of it, or taking any 
pains about it. When we know and love a man, and are 
in habits of daily familiar intercourse with him, we know 
his faults almost in a week. We learn where to dis- 
trust him, and where he is not unlikely to fail. But the 
revelation of his goodness is a very slow process. He is 
continually taking us by surprise with disclosures of virtues 
which we never dreamed that he possessed. He comes out 
on great occasions much better than we- expected. In little 
things too and the ordinary wear and tear of life it is only 
by degrees that we become conscious how much real hu- 
mility, patience, sweetness, and unselfishness there is about 
him. There are very few men whom we do not come by 
experience to respect, if only we continue to love them. 
If, as Wordsworth says, all things are less dreadful than 
they seem, so is it true that all men are better than they 
seem. We must allow very largely for this, when w^e look 
at the lives of catholics, and pass a judgment on the likeli- 
hood of their salvation. 

The visible character of evil also brings strongly before 
us one of the most frightening features of the world, and 
one which it is hard to dwell upon for any length of time 
without some amount of gloom passing on our spirits. It 
is the ceaseless activity of Satan. His activity is appalling : 
his presence almost ubiquitous: his tyranny universal, over- 
whelming, and successful. Of a truth he needs no repose. 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 825 

To go and lie down upon his bed of fire would be no rest to 
him. Thus the world seems to be always in a storm of his 
creating. One while he is persecuting the good, even in 
the cloister. Another while he is bent on ruining some 
man who is doing a notable work for God. Now he is 
urging on the multitudes of a whole country, and making 
them drunk with the spirit of anarchy and sacrilege. Xow 
he is quietly weaving webs of unholy diplomacy, with a 
fair show of equity or patriotism, around the Holy See, 
that he may cramp its energies for good, and demoralize 
whole nations. Here he is getting up an intricate slander 
which shall throw discredit on God^s servants, and dis- 
honor the cause of religion. There he is sapping the 
foundations of a religious order by the insidious prudence 
of relaxation, or destroying the stability of some grand 
work of mercy by leading the founders to seek their own 
reputation and glory in it instead of God^s. One while he 
is inspiring the press, and hiding the poison that he spreads 
under the rhetoric of morality and right. Another while 
he is artfully providing for coldness, dissension, and mis- 
understanding among those whose power for God consisted 
in the cordiality of their union. Even the chosen of the 
earth, the holy and the good, are running to and fro upon 
the earth, till they are weary, doing Satan's work and 
dreaming it. is God's. Who can look on such a scene with- 
out disquiet and dismay ? But then we must remember 
the prominent visible character of evil. Satan is active: 
can we suppose that God is not ten thousand times more 
active, even though we see Him less? The very reason 
why we see Him so little is because we do not follow Him, 
and search out His ways, and trace the footprints of His 
operations. If we did we should be astonished at the im- 
mensity, the vigor, and the versatility of the magnificent 
spiritual work which He is doing all over the world in 
every year. Just as science tells us that the earth's sur- 

2c 



826 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

face is never still, but that some portion of it somewhere 
all day and night is quaking and vibrating Tvith the pulsa- 
tions of the forces bound up within the centre of the planet, 
so to the observant and discerning eye of faith the whole 
natural world of created wills and ways is tremulous and 
troubled by the forces of the supernatural world, now forcing 
their way to the surface, now engulfing whole regions, now 
raiising lofty summits of new mountains out of deep val- 
leys, and now altering the very features of civilization by 
diverting the mighty currents of the mind and purpose of 
humanity. 

If the vigor of God abides with such intensity in every 
particle of the inanimate world, everywhere wedding 
strength to beauty, so that the union might captivate with 
its exquisite niceties the intelligence of angels; if in every 
mineral atom He rules intimately by His presence, His 
essence, and His power; how much more shall we believe 
that He informs and controls the w^orld of men by the 
energies of an allwise providence, whose majestic ope- 
rations have all of them the one single scope and end of 
love for their blissful accomplishment ? We have already 
seen enough of the doctrine of grace to be aware to what 
an almost incredible extent it discloses the divine activity. 
Temptation is feeble, languid, intermittent, and inert, com- 
pared with this. Satan grows weary, even though he can- 
not rest, while the perseverance of grace is incomparable, 
like the freshness of that eternal mercy from which it 
emanates. Moreover we know that Satan is bound by the 
coming of our Lord. The little Babe of Bethlehem cir- 
cumscribed his monstrous empire. If he is as wild and 
fierce as ever, he has now found the length of his chain, 
and beyond that his fury is unavailing. Even within his 
greatly lessened sphere, the Cross of Christ is a perpetual 
torture, an endless defeat to his malicious wiles. The very 
presence of the Church is an unbroken exorcism to the bafiied 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 327 

prince of darkness. Her benedictions keep extruding him 
from one corner of creation after another. Her exorcisms dis- 
possess him even of the hidden spiritual strongholds in which 
he craves to keep his court. Her holy presences are tortures 
to him, worse, some of them at least, than the fires of that 
abyss which is the fallen creature's home. Up and down 
all lands St. Raphael is for ever binding him in the upper 
uninhabitable parts of the spiritual Egypt. Who then can 
believe that in God's own cloistered dwelling place, the 
sanctuary of His Church, Satan's activity will prevail 
against His, and that He will be defeated even where His 
choice most loves to dwell? Satan broke into the first 
paradise of God, when he was young, and before the Cross 
of Christ had bound him, and what followed ? The saving 
of Adam and of Eve by a more copious salvation, the super- 
abundance of redeeming grace, the glorious r^ign of the 
Queen of the Immaculate Conception, and the total triumph 
of the Incarnate Word ! Much more will like consequences 
follow now. We must not tremble too much at Satan's 
power. He is under our feet already. We are stronger 
far than he. We must remember the story of the servant 
of Eliseus in the fourth book of Kings. The servant of the 
man of God, rising early, went out, and saw an army round 
about the city, and horses, and chariots ; and he told him, 
saying, Alas, alas, alas, my lord, what shall we do ? But 
he answered. Fear not : for there are more with us than 
with them. And Eliseus prayed, and said. Lord, open his 
eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of 
the servant, and he saw, and behold the mountain was full 
of horses and chariots of fire, round about Eliseus. 

The very inconceivable magnificence of God would lead 
us to suppose that the number of the saved, which is one 
of the greatest glories of His creation, would be something 
far beyond our utmost expectations. Has it not been so in 
every experience we have ever had of God ? Has He not 



328 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

always outdone His own promises, as welF as outstripped 
our imaginations ? Have not His gifts always come in an 
embarrassing abundance ? Have we ever formed an ex- 
pectation of mercy or of grace, which has not been fulfilled 
far beyond our hopes, as if not even our necessities, much 
less our merits, but His own liberality, were the rule of 
answered prayer? Is it likely to be less so, or are we 
likely to find God changed all at once, in a matter, in which 
not only our happiness, but the honor of His dear Son and 
the interests of His own wonderful glory, are so exceedingly 
involved? There is something so uncongenial in the 
thought, that it surely cannot be received unless it be re- 
vealed. There is no word which describes His love of us 
as our Creator so faithfully as magnificence, and wdll His 
love as our Last End be less magnificent, less efficacious in 
the triumph of its glorious attractions ? There is no word 
to express His prodigal expenditure in our redemption, ex- 
cept magnificence ; can we conceive, in a divine work, of a 
magnificence in the design which shall not be equalled by 
magnificence in the execution? No one doubts that hell 
will be unspeakably more dreadful than we expected ; be- 
cause no one doubts but that our little views will be found 
foolishly narrow when compared with the transcendent 
realities of God. So will it be found with our notions of the 
number of the saved. Yet, w'hen we think of what the 
catholic church is, and of all the privileges involved in being 
a catholic, it seems only reasonable to expect that on the 
whole far more of them would be saved than lost. There 
is no magnificence in this idea. There would be a sense of 
failure and incompleteness in the opposite opinion. No 
one can think steadily and continuously on the matter with- 
out coming to this conclusion. But of necessity, because 
He is Himself, God will go far out of sight of our beliefs 
in the actual splendor of His accomplishments. So that 
from what we know of God we should augur that very few 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 329 

catholics, comparatively speaking, would be lost. The 
salvation of almost all of them seems to be claimed by the 
very magnificence of God. He is a bold man, who, without 
the Church to back him, believes that God^s own gift of 
free will, which He has mysteriously allowed to do Him so 
much injury in time, shall have a final and complete victory 
over Him for eternity ; and if God is love, which is of faith, 
then hell will be no victory to Him. 

The honor of the Precious Blood would imply and re- 
quire as much as the magnificence of God. It is a hard 
saying that the majority of those for whom it was shed 
should be lost eternally. We are purposely turning our 
eyes away from all without the Church, saying nothing, 
defining nothing, hinting nothing, guessing nothing ! It is 
not our concern. But how hard will it be to say that of 
those souls, who have been actually washed in it again and 
again, the majority are lost. It has cleansed them in bap- 
tism, and printed an inefi'aceable character upon their 
brows. It has absolved them again and again. It has run 
through them with thrills of fervor and fortitude in con- 
firmation. Its red living pulses have beaten with their 
human life within the heart at communion. Are we then 
to say that of those, who of all mankind have most trusted the 
Blood of Jesus, and have made most use of it, the majority 
are lost? What ground is there in dogmatic theology for 
an assertion so little to the honor of our dearest Lord? 
One drop is more than enough to redeem all the possible 
sins of all possible worlds, and yet oceans of it cannot suc- 
ceed in redeeming the majority of the members of His 
Church ! Who would hesitate at anything which the Church 
taught him to believe, and who would believe this unless 
the Church should teach it ? 

Then again, the action of the sacraments is probably 

much greater than we have any notion of. We learn a 

great deal that is very surprising from theology, enough to 

set us gratefully wondering at the ingenious excesses of 

2c2 



380 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

our Creator's love. But what we learn there rather shows 
us the extent of our ignorance than furnishes us with any- 
thing like a complete science. We may follow, first the 
school which teaches that the operation of the sacraments 
is moral, then the school which teaches that it is physical, 
and we are better and holier, because more loving, men for 
our researches. But have they not left us at a point be- 
yond which, though we could get no further, we saw that 
sacramental grace was advancing far beyond us with an 
operation we could not comprehend, into recesses of which 
mystical theologians speak in grandiloquent words and 
with the abstrusest terms. When we discuss the deep of the 
soul, or the point of the spirit, or whether the character of 
a sacrament is set as a signet on the soul or on the faculties 
of the soul, we are at the end of our mind^s tether, and 
grace has shot miles ahead, and is working grandly out of 
sight. All God's works are greater when we get to look 
into them, than they seemed at first. Especially must it be 
so with such supernatural works as His sacraments. It is 
conceivable that a clear view of the operation of the sacra- 
ments, both in themselves, and also retrospectively in 
our own souls, may be a not insignificant item in our 
future blessedness. One good communion is enough, 
they say, to make a saint. Now think what goes to the 
making of a saint, the numberless things, their inexhaust- 
ible variety, their positive contradictoriness, their unlikely 
combinations, the intricate wide-spreading possibilities of 
their perseverance ; and what can the axiom mean, except 
that, not only the inward power of a sacrament, but its 
actual operation, goes farther and deeper than we can fol- 
low it ? Look then at the numberless receptions of sacra- 
ments, which there are daily in the Church, and can you 
seriously believe that the result of it all is, that the ma- 
jority of Catholics are not saved? be sure you are esti- 



THE GREAl MASS OF BELIEVERS. 331 

mating far too low the glorious efficacy of the divine inter- 
ventions, the successful majesty of creative love ! 

Our ignorance of the last inward processes of death-beds 
leaves one of the most spacious portions of our lives inac- 
cessible to our notice. Life is not counted only by material 
time. The world, and all its sights and sounds, too often 
leave little room for God in the hearts of men. But the 
hour of death is very spacious. It gives God room. It 
turns minutes into years. It redoubles and redoubles the 
swift processes of the mind just on the eve of its ejection 
from the body. It is an hour of truth, and an hour of truth 
is longer than a century of falsehood. Heaven draws 
near to it, to help as well as to behold. It is God's last 
chance with His creature, and divine wisdom must know 
well how to use its chances. A man is freed from many 
laws, when time and space are visibly melting away in the 
white light of eternity, or rather he is being brought under 
wider and larger laws. He can live many lives within the 
compass of His agony. We know very little of what goes 
on then. The thick curtains of the glazed eye, of the ex- 
pressionless or only pain-furrowed face, and of the inarti- 
culate voice, are drawn round the last earthly audience 
between the Creator and the creature. But observation 
and psychology combine to teach us that much does go on, 
and of a far more intelligent nature, than we should other- 
wise conceive. " Eeally, according to my observations, '' 
says Sir Benjamin Brodie,^ " the mere act of dying is sel- 
dom, in any sense of the word, a very painful process. It is 
true that some persons die in a state of bodily torture, as 
in cases of tetanus ; that the drunkard, dying of delirium 
tremens, is haunted by terrific visions ; and that the victim 
of that most horrible of all diseases, hydrophobia, in addi- 
tion to those peculiar bodily sufferings from which the 

♦Psychological Enquiries, p. 130. 



oo2 TTIE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

disease has derived its name, may be in a state of terror 
from the supposed presence of frightful objects — which are 
presented to him as realities, even to the last. But these 
and some other instances which I might adduce are excep- 
tions to the general rule, which is, that both mental and 
bodily sufl^rings terminate long before the scene is finally 
closed. Then as to the actual fear of death ; it seems to 
me that the Author of our existence, for the most part, 
gives it to us when it is intended that we should live, and 
takes it away from us when it is intended that we should 
die. Those who have been long tormented by bodily pain 
are generally as anxious to die as they ever were to live. So it 
often is with those whose life has been protracted to an ex- 
treme old age, beyond the usual period of mortality, even 
when they labor under no actual disease. It is not very 
common for any one to die merely of old age ; — 

" Like ripe fruit to drop 
Into his mother's lap." 

But I have known this to happen ; and a happy conclusion 
it has seemed to be of worldly cares and joys. It was like 
falling to sleep, never to awake again in this state of exist- 
ence. Some die retaining all their faculties, and quite 
aware that their dissolution is at hand. Others offer no 
signs of recognition of external objects, so that it is im- 
possible for us to form any positive opinion whether they 
do or do not retain their sensibility ; and others, again as 
I have already stated, who appear to be insensible and un- 
conscious, when carefully watched, are found not to be so 
in reality ; but they die contentedly. I have myself never 
known but two instances in which, in the act of dying, 
there were manifest indications of the fear of death.'^ In 
the life of Condren there is a very remarkable passage 
urging on us the duty of thanksgiving to God for the graces 
He bestows on the dying, inasmuch as ** His compassion 
for them is inexplicable, and He seems to distribute His 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 333 

favors to them all the more williDgly, because they are 
hardly now in danger of profaning them/^ Beautiful 
thought ! how much of the beauty of God's love is 
gathered round the dying bed, how much more than we 
can see, how much more than we believe ! We grant 
that it is unknown ground ; but because mercy is so 
much needed then, because mercy has had so many 
antecedents with the soul, because it is God's Avill it 
should be saved, and finally because God is such a God 
as we know Him well to be, we boldly claim all that 
unknown land of catholic death-beds for the simple sove- 
reignty of the divine compassion. That hour may explain 
many inexplicable salvations. The gloomiest mind must 
admit, that it may have shrouded in it endless possibilities 
of salvation ; and with such a God at such an hour the 
possibilities grow miraculously into probabilities, and forth- 
with disappear in those sweet sudden certainties with which 
the dying child of Jesus has fallen asleep upon its Father's 
bosom. 

When we see a man sinning, we see his sin, but we can 
seldom see the excuses of his sin. This is a very important 
consideration in the present discussion, and has already 
been partially adverted to. The depths of invincible igno- 
rance may underlie no inconsiderable region of a man's 
moral nature, and each individual character has an invin- 
cible ignorance belonging to itself. It is a thing we catinot 
possibly presume upon for ourselves, because a suspicion 
destroys it: but we may put much to its account in our 
neighbor's favor. Again, the violence of the temptation 
is invisible ; and even if we saw it, we could not see the pecu- 
liar oppressiveness of it to another's heart, or its almost 
irresistible tyranny because of previous habits. Yet surely 
there are many cases in which the vehemence of the temp- 
tation is a mitigating circumstance in punishment, even if 
it be not actual plea for mercy. We must also have a 



334 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

thorough acquaintance with a man's peculiar turn of mind, 
the bent of his disposition, the circumstances of his past 
life, and, most of all, his early education, before we are at 
all in a condition to form an estimate of what his guilt is 
in the sight of God." Also men often fall, when they are 
in a good state, from a momentary self-trust, or a sudden 
assault of Satan, God permitting it for their greater good 
and more entire humility; and then a man's sin is an ex- 
ceptional case, and we cannot argue from it to his habitual 
state. All these considerations, and many more which 
might be adduced, very much detract from the value of our 
observations on the sins of Catholics as proofs that by far 
the greater number of them are not ultimately saved. 

This leads us to a further consideration. It can hardly 
be denied that men's actions are often worse than their 
hearts, even when they proceed from the heart ; and they 
have often less heart in them than they seem to have. For 
instance, a man commits a sin in a sudden outburst of 
passion, that passion may have felt some peculiar sting in 
the provocation which another would not feel, and it may 
have fallen upon him when he was physically agitated or 
when his nerves were unstrung. For all this the sin may 
remain a sin, and yet be no fair index of the sinner's 
heart. Or, again, men are propelled into sin not unfre- 
quently by false shame, by human respect, by bad com- 

* Lacordaire says beautifully of the sinner as he is in the sight of God.— 
Dieu y reconnait encore sa main. Comme uue statue mutilee sort de la 
terre ou les siecles I'aTaient enfouie, ainsi Tame degradee par le peche ap- 
parait aux regards de son pere ; c'est un marbre deshonore, mais ou respire 
oncore la vie, et auquel I'artiste supreme peut rendre sa premiere beaute. 
II y travaille ayecardeur; il aime ce debris; 11 y frappe des coups qui em- 
euvent sou esperance et altendrissent ses regrets. Ce n'est qu'a la mort que 
le mal perseverant prend uue consistance a I'eprenve de I'amour divin, et 
que Dieu le Toit comme un impardonnable enuemi. Jusquela, il appartient 
encore a, I'architecture du bien; il est une pierre esperable de la sainte cite, 
et peut-etre y entrera-t-il en un lieu magnifique, qui etonnera rinnocence 
sans la decourager. Conference.'^ de 1851. 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 335 

pany ; and the man^s heart may be far better all the while 
than its outward actions testify. Many a man looks to his 
neighbors a very monster of depravity, while the priest, 
who heard his general confession, has been almost touched 
to tears with the spots of green verdure, the almost feminine 
sensibilities, the refined kindnesses, but above all with the 
moral shyness, the ground of so many virtues, which he 
found in that great rough nature. Are we not learning 
every day to be less surprised at finding how so very much 
good can dwell with so very much evil? Then, again, 
many have so many odd crossings in their minds which tell 
upon their motives, and hamper the free action of their 
moral sense ; and thus it is that cruelty in war, agrarian 
murders, and the like, are not on the whole such conclusive 
proofs of a depraved heart as they are commonly taken to 
be. Much crime lies at the door of a warped mind ; and 
how much of that crime is sin can be known to God alone. 
The heart is the jewel which He covets for His crown, and 
if the heart which we do not see is better than the actions 
that we see, God be praised! for then the world is a trifle 
less dismal than it seems. 

It was perhaps these and similar considerations of human 
charity, almost infinitely magnified by His Sacred Heart, 
which made Jesus on earth such a lover of sinners. We 
know well that His predeliction was for themo He came 
to seek and to save what was lost, and the more lost a soul 
was, the more especially He came to seek it and to save it. 
He seemed to prefer the society of sinners to any other ; 
and all-holy as He was, it is wonderful how He contrived 
at once to exhibit His holiness and also to put sinners into 
80 interesting a light ; and He, which is much to be re- 
membered, is the Judge at last. Those sinners, who came 
near Him in the Gospel and had intercourse with Him, 
seem to be almost His chosen souls. There is a poetry 
thrown around their memories, even in the case of the 



336 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

poor young man who did not follow Ilim, which is nothing 
else but the lustre of the Saviour^s love. So is it always 
with the saints of Jesus. They are characterized by a 
hopeful view of sinners. They have a positive devotion to 
them, as our Lord had. The very power of the religious 
communities, which have to deal with the reformation of 
sinners, consists at once in their tender love of them and 
their supernatural respect for them. Without this last 
quality even the charity of the spouses of Christ will be 
but intermittent, and lose the perfection of its beauty, the 
uniformity of its sweetness, and the power from God to ac- 
complish and bring to a happy persevering issue the 
glorious work of conversion in the soul. In the place of 
the steadiness of grace, their works of mercy will have all 
the characteristics of capricious nature. ! it is a Christ- 
like thing to love sinners. But is not our love of them a 
piteous horror rather than true love, if our view of them is 
to be so depressing and overclouded, that we are to believe 
that the greater number even of catholics are not to be 
saved ? Does not this peculiar tenderness, this almost de- 
votion of our Blessed Lord, point to a far more cheering 
view ? Pray, said the Carmelite prioress of Beaune to 
Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, pray for this soul, 
though I cannot hope for its conversion. Mother, 
replied Margaret, wherefore doubt the goodness of our 
God? Is not this to do Him a dishonor? Who has ever 
invoked the Holy Child Jesus without being heard ? Now 
let us go and implore of Him the grace which you desire, 
and three days shall not pass before your wishes shall be 
gratified. 

The saints look at sinners as saints themselves in possi- 
bility. Their hopefulness is the secret of their charity. 
Their humility also, which gives them a clear view of the 
excess of God^s grace over the amount of their own cor- 
respondence, makes them slow to believe that others, even 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 337 

with less grace, will not surpass their own attainments. 
Thus they come to believe, what the experience of those 
versed in the affairs of souls abundantly establishes, that 
conversion is one of the most common phenomena of 
grace. It is the sort of thing to be expected of grace, the 
ordinary occurrence which comes as a matter of course, just 
as the sun warms, or the frost chills, or the water wets us, 
or the fire burns us. Now we have already seen the 
immense abundance of grace, with which heaven inundates 
the earth, and if conversion is quite an ordinary occurrence 
with it, and sinners alone can strictly speaking be the 
subjects of conversion, it follows that the great mass of ap- 
parently unworthy catholics is the chosen theatre of one 
of the strongest as well as the commonest of the operations 
of grace. Thus it is that apostolic zeal, with its enlightened 
love, looks at sinners as the materials for the future 
triumphs of Jesus, as the harvest yet ungarnered of His 
Passion and His Cross. Bad catholics, those who appear 
bad to us, are but a proportion of all catholics, and if re- 
deeming grace has yet got to invade that proportion, and 
according to all its laws must triumphantly invade it, we 
can hardly think otherwise than that the majority of 
catholics will be saved. If we put all our data together, 
conversion can hardly be common in the Church, unless 
salvation is common too. 

There is another point, w^hich has already been adverted 
to, but which must not be omitted in the present enumera- 
tion. When men look at a country, or a neighborhood, or 
a town, and pass a judgment on its religious condition, not 
only must they necessarily have insufficient data, but they 
are very liable to fall into an inaccuracy w^hich seriously 
affects the value of their observations. They do not dis- 
tinguish between the sinfulness of sin and the deformity 
of sin, which last spreads out and covers a greater extent 
of ground than the guilt, infecting the manners, tainting 
22 2d 



338 THE GREAT MASS OE BELIEVERS. 

the whole tone and atmosphere, and altogether making a 
much greater show than the real sin. Much that is 
morally unlovely is not sin, certainly not mortal sin. 
And yet it catches the eye, and offends our moral 
sense, and is extremely odious in the sight of religion. It 
is, of a truth, an evidence of the existence of sin, but by 
no means a measure of its quantity. Very often, a newly 
converted man is almost as disagreeable and repulsive as 
he was when in his sins. His moral appearance is not 
improved ail at once. The mellowing, softening, beauti- 
fying powers of grace, are long in their operation, and 
follow with slow steps the sharp decisive movements which 
effect conversion at the first. As it is absurd for protes- 
tants to measure the truth of the religions of two countries 
by the success of conquest, the perfection of the monetary 
system, the extension of commerce, or scientific improve- 
ments in agriculture, so is it equally a mistake to decide on 
the religiousness of a population by the offensive promi- 
nences of national character, or by the reigning foibles and 
unworthinesses of a population, or even by a low standard 
of moral integrity in some one or other department, pecu- 
liar to the country, place or time. In the judging of indi- 
viduals, it is still more important to distinguish between 
moral unloveliness and downright sin. Goodness tends to 
be graceful ; but, in this life, there are always to each man 
a thousand causes which hinder its development. 

The extreme severity of the punishments of purgatory is 
another consideration which leads the mind to contemplate 
the immense multitude of the saved, and of those saved 
with very imperfect dispositions, as the only solution of 
those chastisements. Purgatory goes as near to the un- 
riddling the riddle of the world, as any one ordinance of 
God which can be named. Difficulties are perpetually 
drifting that way, to find their explanation ; and the saints 
of God have turned so full a light upon those fields of fire. 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 339 

that the geography of them seems almost as familiar to us 
as the well-known features of the surface of the earth. The 
charitable practices of catholic devotion lead us to spend so 
much of our day amid the patience of that beautiful suffer- 
ing, that it has become to us like the wards of a favorite 
hospital, with its familiar faces, brightening at the welcome 
words of consolation. It is the same fire as hell. That in 
itself is a terrible reflection. The revelations of the saints 
depict the tortures of it as fearful in the extreme. There 
is a consent of them, as to the immense lengths of time 
which souls average under that punishment — a consent 
fully bearing out the practice of the Church in anniversa- 
ries and foundations for masses forever. The very slightest 
infidelities to grace seem to be visited there with the acutest 
sufferings. God Himself has bidden His saints to honor, 
with chaste fear and exceeding awe, the rigors of His jus- 
tice, and the requirements of His purity, in that land of 
bitter long delay. Xow, does it come natural to us to look 
at all this system, this terrible eighth sacrament of fire, 
which is the home of those souls whom the seven real sa- 
craments of earth have not been allowed to purify com- 
pletely — does it come natural to us to look at it all as 
simply a penal machinery invented for the saints and those 
most like the saints, to cut away with its vindictive sharp- 
ness the little imperfections which come of human frailty? 
That it should fulfil this office is most intelligible, most 
accordant with God^s perfections, and most consolatory to 
souls themselves. But does not the view at once recom- 
mend itself to us, that it was an invention of God to mul- 
tiply the fruit of our Saviour's Passion; that it was in- 
tended for the great multitudes who should die in charity 
with God, but in imperfect charity ; and, therefore, that it 
is, as it were, the continuance of death-bed mercies beyond 
the grave ; and that, as such, it throws no uncertain light 



340 THE GREAT MASS OE BELIEVERS. 

on the cheering supposition that most catholics are saved, 
especially of the poor who sorrow and suffer here ? 

Mention has been made, in previous chapters, of God's 
unaccountable contentment with so little, as requisite for 
salvation. Of course, purgatory goes some way towards 
accounting for it, but very far from the whole way. Pur- 
gatory seems too good for ungenerous souls; and yet they 
are crowding into it by thousands, and become beautiful 
amid its flames. The merits and satisfactions of our dear- 
est Lord seem our only refuge, when we see how low it has 
pleased God to put the terms of our redemption. The 
charity of Jesus covers the multitude of the sins of His 
people. God sees the world through Him, not simply by a 
fiction imputing to us the holiness that is our Lord^s, but, 
for His sake and by the efficacy of His Blood, actually 
ennobling our unworthiness, and giving a real greatness 
to our littleness, and a solid value to the merest intentions 
of our love. It is the daily delight of His justice to be 
limited in the operations of its righteous anger by the 
adorable Sacrifice of the Mass ; and the glory of Jesus is 
the grand fundamental law of all creation. Yet, even so, 
God^s contentment with so little is an inscrutable mercy, 
one of those bright lights that are dark because they are 
so bright, and which are rising up perpetually from the 
abysses of creative love. Who shall tell the thousands 
of souls in heaven at this hour, whom, almost to their 
own surprise, that marvellous contentment has exalted 
there? 

Are any two angels exactly in the same degree of glory? 
Theologians say that the graces of each radiant spirit are 
unlike. Perhaps, then, their glories are unequal also. If 
so, what innumerable degrees of bliss there must be in the 
angelic hierarchies ! The saints we know are ranged in 
countless ranks. We are not told that those who are in the 
same rank have all an equal vision. It is of faith that the 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 341 

rewards of heaven differ in degree. It is revealed to us in 
the parables of the talents and the cities. In My Father^s 
house are many mansions, saith our Lord. Star differeth 
from star in glory, is the doctrine of St. Paul. Now, there 
can be no exaggeration in supposing that there are at least 
as many different degrees of happiness in heaven as there 
are degrees of happiness on earth. We know that there 
are as many different degrees of glory hereafter, as there 
are different degrees of grace here ; and, as far as we can 
read the phenomena of grace, it would really seem as if 
those differences were as numerous as the individual hearts 
in which it dwells. This would admit of an immense va- 
riety of scales of goodness upon earth, the very lowest of 
which should reach heaven. And would it not be in ac- 
cordance with what we know^ of the w^orks of God, if heaven 
stooped almost down to earth, and well-nigh blended with 
it, only, which is truly difference enough, that the lowest 
there would have God's clear light full upon him, and 
therefore be bathed in joys which eye has not seen, nor ear 
heard, nor heart of man conceived? This view w^ould 
swiftly reach, and that by no circuitous route, the sweet 
conclusion for which we plead, that almost all catholics are 
saved. 

Hell teaches the same comfortable doctrine as heaven, 
although in a rougher strain. Finite evil is almost infin- 
nitely punished, limited sin almost illimitably tormented. 
One mortal sin is chastised eternally. There may be many 
in hell who have committed a less amount of sin than many 
who are in heaven, only they would not lay hold of the 
Cross of Christ, and do penance, and have easy absolution. 
There is no life of self-denying virtue, however long and 
however laborious, but if it ends in impenitence and 
mortal sin, must be continued among the unending pains 
of hell. One mortal sin, and straightway a death without 
contrition, and everlasting despair alone remains. Now 
2d2 



342 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

"will evil be more punished than good is rewarded ? Will 
they even be on equal terms ? Theology teaches that the 
chastisements of hell are for the sake of Christ far less than 
the wretched suiBTerers deserve. There is mercy even there, 
whence hope has long since fled, compassion even there 
where its tenderness seems so wholly out of place, and its 
forbearance thankless and unavailing. Hell is less than 
sin deserves. Then, is there no corner of creation where 
the divine justice enjoys all its rights? At least it is not 
in hell ; for hell is less than sin deserves. beautiful ubi- 
quity of mercy ! The Gospel nowhere tells us that sinners 
shall be punished up to the plenitude of their demerits ; 
but it does tell us about the reward of virtue, that it shall 
be '* good measure, and pressed down, and shaken together, 
and running over.^' You see it is in heaven only that jus- 
tice shall enjoy its royalties ! Shall not then God's reward- 
ing of good be in all respects far beyond, in fulness and 
completeness. His punishment of evil ? Shall not a little 
good, a verj little good, be much rewarded ? And is not 
the number who are rewarded a chief feature in the mag- 
nificence of the reward? Surely not only will heaven be 
unspeakably beyond our deservings, but many will go there, 
, whom only the generosity of divine love and the determina- 
tion of persisting grace could have made deserving. These 
are things which we cannot know, and they are not put 
forward as amounting to arguments ; but there seems some- 
thing easy in the process by which the very existence and 
extremity of hell leads to the conclusion that most catholics 
are saved. 

The providence of God in the lives of men is to each one 
in particular a private revelation of His love. The bio- 
graphy of every one of us is to ourselves as luminously 
supernatural, as palpably full of divine interferences, as if 
it were a page out of the Old Testament history. Moreover 
all that is providential is also merciful. The interferences 



THE GREAT MxiSS OF BELIEVERS. 343 

are all on the side of love. Stern-looking accidents, when 
thej turn their full face to us, beam with the look of love. 
Even our very faults are so strangely overruled that mercy 
can draw materials for its blessings even out of them. It is 
true we may easily delude ourselves. But the natural ten- 
dency to lind a meaning in what happens to ourselves, and 
to exaggerate its significance, cannot altogether, or even 
nearly, account for the providential aspect which our past 
lives present to us, when we reflect upon them in the faith 
and fear of God. Our merciful Creator seems to have led 
us very gently, as knowing how weak and ill we are ; yet 
He has led us plainly towards Himself. If it is not speak- 
ing of Him too familiarly. He seems to have done every- 
thing just at the right time, and in the right place, to have 
put nothing before us till we were ready for it and could 
make the most of it, to have timed His grace and appor- 
tioned it, so that we might have as little as possible the 
guilt of resisting grace, to have weighed even our crosses 
before He laid them upon us, and to have waited an au- 
spicious moment each time He would persuade us to some- 
thing fresh. He has combined events with the most con- 
summate skill, and brought out the most wonderful results, 
and they have always been in our favor. There are diffi- 
culties and seeming exceptions to the ordinary course of 
this genial providence. But it is only at first sight that 
they perplex us. These very exceptions on closer investi- 
gation, no longer experience, turn out to be the most strik- 
ing examples of the general rule of beneficence and love. 
If we ask each man separately, this is what he will tell us. 
\Ye have all of us had this private revelation. But are 
not God's works for the most part remarkable for their 
efficacy ? Do not all these secret biographies of men, with 
their beautiful disclosures of His assiduous ministering 
love, bear upon this question of salvation ? Has He so 
waited upon each of us, that we might at any time have mis- 



344 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

taken Him for our Guardian Angel, instead of our God ? and 
yet is not His solicitude in far the greater number of cases 
to have the one issue which His glory so earnestly desires ? 
Let us dwell on one feature of His providence, the way in 
which He vouchsafes to time things. Think of the hour 
of death, of its surpassing importance, of its thrilling risks, 
of all those inward processes of which we have already 
spoken. Now may we not conclude, or at least with rea- 
sonable hope infer, that to most, if not to all, men, the hour 
of their death is seasonably timed ? They die when it is 
best for them to die. There are some dangers in advance 
which they avoid by dying then. They die when they are 
in the best state for dying. Even the deaths of those who 
are lost may be mercifully timed. When men die young, 
it is perhaps because they would have lost themselves if 
they had lived to be old. When men die late, it is perhaps 
to give them time to correspond to grace, to do penance for 
the past, and especially that they may get rid of some evil 
habit which would else be their perdition, and which the 
mere infirmity of age will help them to abandon. When 
men die just as they are coming into the possession of 
riches, or at the outset of a smiling career of laudable am- 
bition, it is perhaps because God sees in their natural cha- 
racter or in their personal circumstances some seeds of 
future evil, and so He takes them while all that evil lies 
innocently undeveloped in their souls. Who can think of 
what death is, and yet doubt that God^s wisdom and His 
love are brought to bear with inexpressible sweetness both 
on its manner and its time? If God were pleased to tell 
us, we should probably be amazed at the numbers of con- 
vincing reasons that there are why each of us should die 
when, and where, and how we do. The very sight of so 
much legislation and arrangement, on the part of God, 
about this one final act of our probation is doubtless pour- 
ing into the souls of the Blessed at all hours delightful 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 345 

streams of wondering adoration and ecstatic love. Is all 
this true of each Christian death-bed, and are not then by 
far the great majority of Christians saved? 

But what is it which most obviously distinguishes catho- 
lics from all other men? Surely it is the gift of faith. 
This, next to the Beatific Vision of Himself in heaven, is 
the greatest gift which God can give to His creatures : for 
in some respects it may be said to be greater than sancti- 
fying grace, because it is its indispensable foundation. It 
is hard to realize the greatness of a gift which is so inti- 
mate to every operation of our lives. But we may gain 
some idea of its importance when we remember that with- 
out faith no sacraments avail, and that with the loss of 
faith we lose almost all the capabilities of setting ourselves 
right when we have sinned. It is a gift, therefore, which 
we should not only guard most jealously, but which 
we should increase by exercise ; for that it is capable 
of increase by our own correspondence is one of those many 
really startling disclosures of divine love, at which nobody 
is startled because they are so common. We see or hear of 
souls wandering in the darkness, reading, arguing, writing, 
commenting, collating manuscripts, all in perplexity be- 
cause they cannot perceive the Divinity of our Blessed Lord, 
while to every catholic child that sweet converting truth is 
plainer than the sunshine on the trees. The little fellow 
could not doubt it, if he would. He is so sure of it that he 
would be beaten to death rather than say it was not true. 
To others the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity presents 
diflSculties of the most insuperable kind, how God can be 
One God yet Three Persons, how the Son can be evermore 
coequally begotten of the Father, and the Holy Ghost be 
evermore coequally proceeding from the Father and the 
Son. The catholic finds nothing hard in it. He cannot 
explain it, even so far as theology arrives towards an ex- 
planation. But he knows it and sees it as distinctly as the 



346 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

writing of a letter or the pages of a book. Bewilder him 
as you will, you cannot inject a doubt into his mind. He 
cannot help himself; he is more certain of the Holy Trinity, 
than he is of your existence who are standing by him and 
questioning him. glorious necessity of believing, which 
is hardly faith, but actual contact with a supernatural 
world, as if the prerogative of heaven was only to see God, 
while earth's privilege was to touch Him in the dark with 
fearless venture and with thrilling love ! Heaven must in- 
deed be beautiful, if the saints can part there with their 
gift of faith, and not pine to have it back again ! Yet this 
gift every catholic receives, not the faith of devils who be- 
lieve and tremble, but the supernatural gift of divine faith. 
It is faith by which so many after years of sin, quietly and 
as it were naturally, swing round to their anchors, and die 
well. -By this gift the catholic sees far up into the unbe- 
ginning eternity of God, and beholds his own soul lying 
there in the lap of that eternal love. By faith he sees the 
unspeakable operations of the Holy Trinity with its Innas- 
cibility, Generation, and Procession. By faith he scans 
the numberless perfections of God. By faith he sees Jesus, 
God and Man, in the Blessed Sacrament. By faith he be- 
holds Mary on her mediatorial throne. By faith the joys 
of heaven, the delays of purgatory, the pains of hell, are 
familiar to him as the hills and streams and groves where 
his childhood played. By faith he sees the lineaments of 
Jesus in his priests, and beholds the Precious Bh)od drop- 
ping from the hand that is raised to give him absolution. 
This gift is common to all, so common that it stays with us 
even when grace has left us, so persevering and so secure 
of itself that it will lodge with sin and fear no evil ; and is 
there one sign of predestination of which so much can be 
said as of this transcendent gift, which of its sole self 
makes a creature of God into a catholic, and writes upon 
his brow this plain inscription of his Creator, It is My 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 347 

especial Will that this creature should be saved, and live 
with me for ever ? 

The Church militant on earth is the foreshadowing of 
the Church triumphant in heaven. The destinies of the 
heavenly Church are glassed and mirrored on the earthly 
Church, and are in some sense anticipated there. The end 
of the earthly Church is to be transplanted into the hea- 
venly. Is it not a difficulty, unless authority should teach 
it, to think that less than the great majority of the earthly 
plants will not be worth transplanting? Seed is wasted in 
sowing ; yet the earthly husbandman garners the produce 
of by far the greatest portion of what he sows, even when 
birds, and blight, and lawless footpaths, and uncertain 
weather, and waste, and theft have done their worst. Shall 
the heavenly Husbandman be worse off than they? The 
Church may seem a failure ; but is it likely to be so in 
reality? God has His little flock of saints, of eminent 
souls whom we technically call saints. These He leads by 
extraordinary paths. He introduces them into a mystical 
world. He furnishes them with peculiar graces, and en- 
dows them with miraculous powers. He inspires them with 
unearthly tastes for suffering and abjection, deluges them 
with the most unparalleled afflictions and trials, consigns 
them for years to the intimate assaults, not unfrequently to 
the bodily possession, of demons, constantly suspends their 
common life by mysterious ecstasies, and then again 
plunges them into such pitchy darkness that they hardly 
know if they are in a state of grace. He transfigures all 
their senses. He drives them to the most appalling austeri- 
ties. He animates them to the most heroic deeds of charita- 
ble daring for the good of others, He renews in them super- 
natural likenesses to His Blessed Son. This is not the way 
of salvation, nor even the way of perfection. It is the way 
of the saints. No one is introduced into it except by God 
Himself. He takes the initiative. Every one should aspire 



348 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEYERS. 

to perfection ; no one can lawfully aspire to what is techni- 
cally the way of the saints, namely, the ecstatic."^ Now of 
^nis little flock some, as appears from the records of h agio- 
logy, fail and come to an evil end. But they are, compara- 
tively speaking, few in number, and chiefly notable, not so 
much because they are so rare, as because the phenomenon 
is so terrific. He has two other little flocks, composed of 
religious, priests, laity, and many simple souls, who by 
love have worked themselves beyond the common way of 
precepts into that of counsels and of the inwardly perfect 
observance of the precepts. These are two ways of per- 
fection, often combining, often converging, the way of 
counsels, and the way of perfect interior observance of 
precepts. Neither of them are like the way of the saints. 
We know from the lives of good people, and especially 
the chronicles of religious orders, that many of these 
little flocks go wrong and frustrate the sweet purposes of 
God. Some fall back into the common way, and others find 
no way of salvation because they refuse the way in which 
God has put them. But surely by far the greater number, 

* Many mystical theologians, especially among the Germans, maintain that 
ecstasy is the natural state of unfallen man, that Adam was in an ecstatic 
state until the fall, and by consequence our Blessed Lady all her life. The 
passage in the text is not meant to express so much as this. I suppose that 
the ascetical life can produce -w^hat are technically called saints, without the 
predominance of the mystical element. S. Vincent of Paul looks like an in- 
stance of this. But is there any example of a canonized saint, in whom there 
was not a considerable admixture of the mystical life ? Any-how it is a doc- 
trine of great importance in the theology of the spiritual life, that no man 
has any right to aspire to be what is technically called a saint, still Jess that 
he has any obligation to do so, or that the pursuit of perfection in any way 
involves it. I venture to think that the whole controversy about the obliga- 
tion of aiming at perfection would be put on a plainer footing, if the fourfold 
division of good people, given in the text, were attended to: 1. the saints, 
who tread the ecstatic or mystical way; 2, those who aim at perfection through 
the counsels ; 3, those who aim at perfection through the perfect interior 
observance of the precepts; 4, ordinarily good catholics, saving themselves 
by the frequentation of the sacraments, and by obedience. 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 349 

as far as we can judge from books, persevere, and not only 
save their souls, but avoid purgatory, or are high in heaven. 
Then God has a fourth little flock, the great multitude 
of catholics. It is a very little one compared vp-ith the 
great mass of men on earth, and it is yet more divinely 
distinguished from them, than even the saints or the perfect 
are from itself. A catholic has more marks of special love 
multiplied upon him as compared with other men, than a 
saint has as compared with an ordinary catholic. Why 
may we not think of this fourth little flock, as we think of 
the others, that the failures are few, and the successes 
overwhelmingly numerous, especially as we have more 
grounds to go upon in this last case than in any of the 
others, both because the failure cannot be short of eternal 
misery, and because an equal, if not a greater, amount of 
divine predilection has been shown ? Of those who were 
compelled to come to the banquet in the Gospel, there was 
only one who was without the wedding garment. 

It may be urged, that some of the considerations, which 
have been here adduced, apply also to persons who are not 
catholics. God be praisad if it is so ! The overflow of 
mercy is surely not an argument against its existence. 
That were strange logic. Doubtless the mercy of God 
covers the whole earth as the waters cover the sea. It is 
one of our best joys to know that its abundance is beyond 
our gaze, and above our comprehension. But again we 
turn to those who are before us, to catholics. If any of 
these considerations apply to those outside the Church, and 
if moreover they are true, then a fortiori, as logicians say, 
that is, with tenfold greater force, will they apply to 
catholics. And so, whichever way we turn, the same be- 
nignant conclusion looks us always in the face. 

No one can look forward without very solemn apprehen- 
sions to his final judgment. Yet it is the deliberate convic- 
tion of our best thoughts and most mature reflection, that 

2e 



350 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

we had rather leave our final doom in the hands of the all- 
holy God than in those of the most merciful of sinful men. 
Our knowledge of God does not leave us room for a 
moment^s hesitation. Strange to say ! intimately as we 
know our own wretchedness, and appalled as we often are 
by the vision of our own sins, our sense of security in the 
hands of God rises in great measure from the fact that He 
knows us better than any one else can know us. There 
are so many things by which God will not judge us, and 
by which men would judge us, that it seems as if our de- 
liverance from these was already half a verdict in our 
favor. How often in life are we accused wrongly and mis- 
takenly ! How are motives imputed to us which we never 
had I AVe lose our temper for a moment, and are judged 
by that fact for years to come. When we do wrong, we 
often struggle manfully before we give way, but men put 
not these invisible struggles to our account. Full of want 
of simplicity as we are, and far from perfect truth, we are 
on the whole always more sincere than we seem. We often 
have good motives for imprudent and ill-looking actions. 
When we often appear careless and unkind, some secret 
sorrow is oppressing us, or anxiety disturbing us, or re- 
sponsibility harassing us. Now God sees all this rightly, 
and man cannot. God does not judge us by any of these 
things ; man must. Hence it is, a strange conclusion for 
sinners to come to ! that God loves us better than men do, 
because He knows us better. 

He judges us by our inward religious acts, which neces- 
sarily go for nothing with men. He judges us by the 
fructifying of His own gifts within us, a very slight por- 
tion of which ever becomes visible to men, and even that 
portion only partially visible. Moreover He judges us as 
He eees us in His Son. He judges us by the love which 
Mary, angels, and saints have for us. And finally He 
judges us with all our good ever collectively before Him, 



THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 351 

while our evil is interrupted by frequent absolutions, and 
our sins supernaturallj effaced by the Precious Blood, so 
that by the laws of His own redeeming love He cannot see 
them in the same way that men see them. Thus we are 
most reasonable in preferring rather to be judged by God 
than by men. The acutenesses of their criticism are far 
more to be dreaded than the niceties of His justice, when 
omnipotent love sits by as its assessor. Now if we judge 
that the great majority of catholics will not be saved, it is 
a human judgment ; and like all human judgments, it is 
more rigorous than the divine, because of the ignorance 
and the temper of the judge. Therefore we may modestly 
hope that God^s judgment is otherwise, and that the great 
majority of catholics are saved. It is only applying to the 
case of the multitude what we each of us find true in our 
own, that largeness and allowance in the Creator's judg- 
ment, which it is hopeless to look for at the tribunal of the 
creature. 

We are speaking of what we do not know. But it is at 
least allowable to put all these considerations in opposition 
to those which justly or not, give us hard and to our weak- 
ness dishonorable thoughts of God.^ They are not doc- 

* " He (PerS de Ravignan) then passed to a subject which was of peculiar 
interest to me, as touching the sorest place of a parish priest. * Suarez,' 
said he, 'has a discussion on the fewness of the saved, whether this is said 
with reference to the world or the Church ; and he applies it to the world 
but not to the Church. I think he is right ; tMs is the result of a ministry 
of twenty years in ivhich I have necessarily had large experience: it is the feel- 
ing also of our fathers generally. You know that the Church teaches that at- 
trition only, combined with the sacrament of penitence, avails to salvation, 
attrition arising from motives of fear rather than of love. Contrition by 
itself, one act of pure love by the soul, avails even without the Sacrament, 
if there be a firm purpose and desire to receive it. God has no desire for tho 
sinner's death. Jansenism has done great harm to this subject, by inspiring 
a sort of despair which is most dangerous.' I observed that purgatory was 
the necessary complement of such a doctrine. 'It is so,' said he, 'and 
though God is alone the judge of the sufficiency of those acts of the dying, 
yet we may hope that a great number come within the terms of salvation, 
whatever purifying process they may afterwards require.'" — Allies. Journal 
in France. 



352 THE GREAT MASS OF BELIEVERS. 

trines. They are not certainties. They are inferences, 
they are hopes, they are speculations, which are surely 
more in hai-mony with what we know of our most righteous 
and most compassionate Creator, than the opposite view. 
Even if we are wrong, which the last day alone will show, 
we shall be better men for having tried to think such 
thoughts of God as get Him more honor among men, and 
more love from ourselves. God knows His own secret. 
Blessed be His inscrutable judgment ! Let the secret rest 
with Him. Doubt is even better for us than knowledge, 
when He, who is pure love, has chosen to withhold it 
from us. 

"We are speaking of catholics. If our thoughts break 
their bounds, and run out beyond the Church, nothing that 
has been said, has been said with any view to those with- 
out. I have no profession of faith to make about them, 
except that God is infinitely merciful to every soul, that no 
one ever has been, or ever can be, lost by surprise or 
trapped in his ignorance ; and, as to those who may be lost, 
I confidently believe that our Heavenly Father threw His 
arms around each created spirit, and looked it full in the 
face with bright eyes of love, iu the darkness of its mortal 
life, and that of its own deliberate will it would not have 
Him. 



THE WORLD. 



353 



CHAPTER III. 

THE WORLD. 

Linquenda tellus, et domus, et placens 
Uxor : neque harum, quas colis, arborum. 
Te, prseter invisas cupressos, 

Ulla breyem dominum sequetur. 

Horace. 

The question of worldliness is a very difficult one, and 
one which we would gladly have avoided, had it been in 
our power to do so. But it is in too many ways connected 
with our subject, to allow of its being passed over in silence. 
In the first place, a thoughtful objector will naturally say, 
If the relation between the Creator and the creature is such 
as has been laid down in the first eight chapters, and fur- 
thermore if it is as manifest and undeniable as it is urged 
to be, how comes it to pass that it is not more universally, 
or at least more readily, admitted than it is ? Almost all 
the phenomena of the world betray a totally opposite con- 
viction, and reveal to us an almost unanimous belief in 
men, that they are on quite a difi'erent footing with God 
from that one, which is here proclaimed to be the only true 
and tenable one. There must at least be some attempt to 
explain this discrepancy between what we see and what we 
are taught. The explanation, we reply, is to be found in 
what Christians call worldliness. It is this which stands 
in the way of God^s honor, this which defrauds Him of the 
tribute due to Ilim from His creatures, this which even 
blinds their eyes to His undeniable rights and prerogatives. 
How God's own world comes to stand between Himself and 
23 2e2 



854 THE WORLD. 

the rational soul, how friendship with it is enmity with 
Him, — indeed an account of the whole matter must be 
gone into, in order to show, first, that the influence of the 
world does account for the non-reception of right views 
about God, and, secondly, that the world is in no condition 
to be called as a witness, because of the essential falsehood 
of its character. This identical falsehood about God is its 
■very life, energy, significance, and condemnation. The 
right view of God is not unreal, because the world ignores 
it. On the contrary, it is because it is real that the unreal 
world ignores it, and the world's ignoring it is, so far forth, 
an argument in favor of the view. 

But not only does this question of worldliness present 
itself to us in connection with the whole teaching of the 
first eight chapters ; it is implicated in the two objections 
which have already been considered, namely, the difficulty 
of salvation and the fewness of the saved. If it is easy to 
be saved, whence the grave semblance of its difficulty? 
If the majority of adult catholics are actually saved, be- 
cause salvation is easy, why is it necessary to draw so 
largely on the unknown regions of the death-bed, in order 
to make up our majority ? Why should not salvation be 
almost universal, if the pardon of sin is so easy, grace so 
abundant, and all that is wanted is a real earnestness about 
the interests of our souls? If you acknowledge, as you do, 
that the look of men's lives, even of the lives of believers, is 
not as if they were going to be saved, and that they are 
going to be saved in reality in spite of appearances, what 
is the explanation of these appearances, when the whole 
process is so plain and easy ? To all this the answer is, 
that sin is a partial explanation, and the devil is a partial 
explanation, but that the grand secret lies in worldliness. 
That is the chief disturbing force, the prime counteracting 
power. It is this mainly, which keeps down the number 
of the saved; it is this which makes the matter seem so 



THE WORLD. 855 

difficult which is intrinsically so easy ; nay, it is this which 
is a real difficulty, though not such an overwhelming one 
as to make salvation positively difficult as a whole. Plainly 
then the phenomenon of worldliness must be considered 
here, else it will seem as if an evident objection, and truly 
the weightiest of all objections, had not been taken into 
account, and thus an air of insecurity will be thrown, not 
only over the answer to the two preceding objections, but 
also over the whole argument of the first eight chapters. 

This inquiry into worldliness will, in the third place, 
truthfully and naturally prepare us for the great con- 
clusion of the whole inquiry, namely, the personal love 
of God is the only legitimate development of our position 
as creatures, and at the same time the means by which 
salvation is rendered easy, and the multitude of the saved 
augmented. For it will be found that the dangers of worldli- 
ness are at once so great and so peculiar, that nothing but 
a personal love of our Creator will rescue us from them, 
enable us to break with the world, and to enter into the 
actual possession of the liberty of the sons of God. 

0, it is a radiant land, — this wide, outspread, many- 
colored mercy of our Creator! But we must be content 
for a while now to pass out of its kindling sunshine into 
another land of most ungenial darkness^ in the hope that 
we shall come back heavy laden with booty for God's glory, 
and knowing how to prize the sunshine more than ever. 
There is a hell already upon earth ; there is something 
which is excommunicated from God's smile. It is not alto- 
gether matter, nor yet altogether spirit. It is not man 
only, nor Satan only, nor is it exactly sin. It is an in- 
fection, an inspiration, an atmosphere, a life, a coloring 
matter, a pageantry, a fashion, a taste, a witchery, an 
impersonal but a very recognisable system. None of these 
names suit it, and all of them suit it. Scripture calls it, 
•' The World/' God's mercy does not enter into it. All 



856 THE WORLD. 

hope of its reconciliation with Him is absolutely and eter- 
nally precluded. Kepentance is incompatible with its 
existence. The sovereignty of God has laid the ban of the 
empire upon it ; and a holy horror ought to seize us when 
we think of it. Meanwhile its power over the human crea- 
tion is terrific, its presence ubiquitous, its deceitfulness 
incredible. It can find a home under every heart beneath 
the poles, and it embraces with impartial affection both 
happiness and misery. It is wider than the catholic Church, 
and is masterful, lawless, and intrusive within it. It can- 
not be damned, because it is not a person, but it will perish 
in the general conflagration, and so its tyranny be over, 
and its place know it no more. We are living in it, 
breathing it, acting under its influences, being cheated by 
its appearances, and unwarily admitting its principles. Is 
it not of the last importance to us that we should know 
something of this huge evil creature, this monstrous sea- 
bird of evil, which flaps its wings from pole to pole, and 
* frightens the nations into obedience by its discordant cries ? 
But we must not be deceived by this description. The 
transformations of the spirit of the world are among its 
most wonderful characteristics. It has its gentle voice, its 
winning manners, its insinuating address, its aspect of 
beauty and attraction ; and the lighter its foot and the 
softer its voice, the more dreadful is its approach. It is by 
the firesides of rich and poor, in happy homes where Jesus 
is named, in gay hearts which fain would never sin. In 
the chastest domestic affections it can hide its poison. In 
the very sunshine of external nature, in the combinations 
of the beautiful elements, — it is somehow even there. The 
glory of the wind-swept forest and the virgin frost of the 
Alpine summits have a taint in them of this spirit of the 
world. It can be dignified as well. It can call to 
order sin which is not respectable. It can propound wise 
maxims of public decency, and inspire wholesome regula- 



THE WORLD. 357 

tions of police. It can open the churches, and light tho 
candles on the altar, and entone Te Deums to the Majesty 
on high. It is often prominently, and almost pedantically, 
on the side of morality. Then, again, it has passed into 
the beauty of art, into the splendor of dress, into the 
magnificence of furniture. Or, again, there it is, with 
high principles on its lips, discussing the religious voca- 
tion of some youth, and praising God and sanctity, while 
it urges discreet delay, and less self-trust, and more consi- 
derate submissiveness to those who love him, and have 
natural rights to his obedience. It can sit on the benches 
of senates and hide in the pages of good books. And yet 
all the while it is the same huge evil creature which was 
described above. Have we not reason to fear ? 

Let us try to learn more definitely what the world is, the 
world in the scripture sense. A definition is too short, a 
description is too vague. God never created it: how then 
does it come here ? There is no land, outside the creation 
of God, which could have harbored this monster, who now 
usurps so much of this beautiful planet, on which Jesus 
"was born and died, and from which He and His sinless 
Mother rose to heaven ? It seems to be a sort of spirit 
which has risen up from a disobedient creation, as if the 
results, and after-consequences of all the sins that ever 
were, rested in the atmosphere, and loaded it with some 
imperceptible but highly powerful miasma. It cannot be 
a person, and yet it seems as if it possessed both a mind 
and a will, which on the whole are very consistent, so as 
to disclose what might appear to be a very perfect self-r 
consciousness. It is painless in its operations, and unerring 
too ; and just as the sun bids the lily be white and the rose 
red, and they obey without an efi'ort, standing side by side 
with the game aspect and in the same soil, so this spirit of 
the world brings forth colors and shapes and scents in our 
different actions, without the process being cognisable to 



358 THE WORLD. 

ourselves. The power of mesmerism on the reluctant will 
is a good type of the power of this spirit of the world upon 
ourselves. It is like grace, onl}'' that it is its contradic- 
tory. 

But it has not always the same power. If the expression 
may be forgiven, there have been times when the world 
was less worldly than usual ; and this looks as if it were 
something which the existing generation of men always 
gave out from themselves, a kind of magnetism of varying 
strengths and different properties. As Satan is sometimes 
bound, so it pleases God to bind the world sometimes. Or 
He thunders, and the atmosphere is cleared for awhile, and 
the times are healthy, and the Church lifts her head and 
walks quicker. But, on the whole, its power appears to be 
increasing with time. In other words, the world is getting 
more worldly. Civilization develops it immensely, and 
progress helps it on, and multiplies its capabilities. In the 
matter of worldliness, a highly civilized time is to a com- 
paratively ruder time what the days of machinery are to 
those of hand-labor. We are not speaking of sin ; that is 
another idea, and brings in fresh considerations : we are 
speaking only of worldliness. If the characteristics of 
modern times go on developing with the extreme velocity 
and herculean strength which they promise now, we may 
expect (just what prophecy would lead us to anticipate) 
that the end of the world and the reign of anti-Christ 
would be times of the most tyrannical worldliness. 

This spirit also has its characteristics of time and place. 
The worldliness of one century is different from that of 
another. Now it runs towards ambition in the upper 
classes and discontent in the lower. Now to money- 
making, luxury, and lavish expenditure. One while it 
sets towards grosser sins ; another while towards wicked- 
ness of a more refined description ; and another while it 
will tolerate nothing but educated sin. It also has period- 



THE WORLD. 359 

ical epidemics and accessions of madness, though at what 
intervals, or whether by the operation of any law, must be 
left to the philosophy of history to decide. Certain it is, 
that ages have manias, the source of which it is difficult to 
trace, but under which whole communities, and sometimes 
nations, exhibit symptoms of diabolical possession. Indeed, 
on looking back, it would appear that every age, as if an 
age were an individual and had an individual life, had 
been subject to some vertigo of its own, by which it may 
be almost known in history. Very often, the phenomena, 
such as those of the French Revolution, seem to open out 
new depths in human nature, or to betoken the presence 
of some preternatural spiritual influences. Then, again, 
ages have panics, as if some attribute of God came near to 
the world, and cast a deep shadow over its spirit, making 
men's hearts quail for fear. 

This spirit is further distinguished by the evidences 
which it presents of a fixed view and a settled purpose. 
It is capricious, but, for all that, there is nothing about it 
casual, accidental, fortuitous. It is well instructed for its 
end, inflexible in its logic, and making directly, no matter 
through what opposing medium, to its ultimate results. 
Indeed, it is obviously informed with the W'isdom and sub- 
tlety of Satan. It is his greatest capability of carrying on 
his war against God. Like a parasite disease, it fixes on 
the weak places in men, pandering both to mind and flesh, 
but chiefly to the former. It is one of those three powers"'^ 
to whom such dark pre-eminence is given, the world, the 
flesh, and the devil; and, among these three, it seems to 
have a kind of precedence given to it, by the way in which 
our Lord speaks of it in the Gospel, though the line of its 
diplomacy has been to have itself less thought of and less 
dreaded than the other two ; and, unhappily for the inte- 

* Modi tentationum varii sunt, communiter vero ad tria genera reducuntur, 
came, mundo, et daemone. Suarez de Gratia, lib. i. c. xxiii. n. 3. 



360 THE WORLD. 

rests of God and the welfare of souls, it has succeeded. It 
is, then, pre-eminent among the enemies of God. Hence 
the place which it occupies in Holy Scripture. It is the 
world which hated Christ, the world which cannot receive 
the Spirit, the world that loves its own, the world that 
rejoices because Christ has gone away, the world which 
He overcame, the world for which He would not pray, the 
world that by wisdom knew not God, the world whose 
spirit Christians were not to receive, the world that was 
not worthy of the saints, the world whose friendship is 
enmity with God, the world that passeth away with its 
lusts, the world which they who are born of God overcome, 
or, as the Apocalypse calls it, the world that goes wander- 
ing after the beast. Well then might St. James come to 
his energetic conclusion. Whosoever therefore will be a 
friend of this world, becometh an enemy of God.^ It is 
remarkable also that St. John, the chosen friend of the In- 
carnate Word, and the Evangelist of His Divinity, should 
be the one of the inspired writers who speaks most often 
and most emphatically about the world, as if the spirit of 
Jesus found something especially revolting to it in the spirit 
of the world. 

It is this world which we have to fight against through- 
out the whole of our Christian course. Our salvation de- 
pends upon, our unforgiving enmity against it. It is not so 
much that it is a sin, as that it is the capability of all sins, 
the air sin breathes, the light by which it sees to do its 
work, the hot-bed w^hich propagates and forces it, the in- 
stinct which guides it, the power which animates it. For 
a Christian to look at, it is dishearteningly complete. It is 
a sort of catholic church of the powers of darkness. It has 
laws of its own, and tastes and principles of its own, litera- 

=^ S. John vii. 7, also xiv. 17, also xv. 19, also xvi. 20, also xvi. 33, also xrii. 
9, also 1 Cor. i. 21, also ii, 12, also Heb. xi. 38, also S. James ir. 4, also 1 John 
ii. 17, also v. 4, also Apoc. xiii. 3. 



THE WORLD. 361 

ture of its own, a missionary spirit, a compact system, and 
it is a consistent whole. It is a counterfeit of the Church 
of God, and in the most implacable antagonism to it. The 
doctrines of the faith, the practices and devotions of pious 
persons, the system of the interior life, the mystical and 
contemplative world of the Saints, with all these it is at 
deadly war. And so it must be. The view which the Church 
takes of the world is distinct and clear, and far from flatter- 
ing to its pride. It considers the friendship of the world as 
enmity with God. It puts all the world's affairs under its 
feet, either as of no consequence, or at least of very secon- 
dary importance. It has great faults to find with the effe- 
minacy of the literary character, with the churlishness of 
the mercantile character, with the servility of the political 
character, and even with the inordinateness of the domestic 
character. It provokes the world by looking on progress 
doubtingly, and with what appears a very inadequate inte- 
rest, and there is a quiet faith in its contempt for the world 
extremely irritating to this latter power. 

The world on the contrary thinks that it is going to last 
for ever. It almost assumes that there are no other inte- 
rests but its own, or that if there are, they are either of no 
consequence, or troublesome and in the way. It thinks 
that there is nothing like itself anywhere, that religion 
was made for its convenience, merely to satisfy a want, and 
must not forget itself, or if it claims more, must be put 
down as a rebel, or chased away as a grumbling beggar ; and 
finally it is of opinion, that of all contemptible things spiri- 
tuality is the most contemptible, cowardly, and little. Thus 
the Church and the world are incompatible, and must re- 
main so to the end. 

AYe cannot have a better instance of the uncongeniality 
of the world with the spirit of the Gospel, than their diffe- 
rence in the estimate of prosperity. All those mysterious 
woes which our Lord denounced against wealth, have their 
2r 



362 THE WORLD. 

explanation in the dangers of woldliness. It is the pecullai 
aptitude of wealth, and pomp, and power, to harbor the 
unholy spirit of the world, to combine with it, and trans- 
form themselves into it, which called forth the thrilling 
malediction of our Lord. Prosperity may be a blessing 
from God, but it may easily become the triumph of the 
world. And for the most part the absence of chastisement 
is anything but a token of God's love. When posterity is 
a blessing, it is generally a condescension to our weakness. 
Those are fearful words, Thou hast already received thy 
reward; yet how many prosperous men there are, the rest 
of whose lives will keep reminding us of them ; the ten- 
dency of prosperity in itself is to wean the heart from God, 
and fix it on creatures. It gives us a most unsupernatural 
habit of esteeming others according to their success. As it 
increases, so anxiety to keep it increases also, and makes men 
restless, selfish, and irreligious ; and at length it superin- 
duces a kind of efi'eminacy of character, which unfits them 
for the higher and more heroic virtues of the Christian 
character. This is but a sample of the difi'erent way in 
which the Church and the world reason. 

Now it is this world which, far more than the devil, far 
more than the flesh, yet in union with both, makes the diffi- 
culty we find in obeying God^s commandments, or following 
His counsels. It is this which makes earth such a place of 
struggle and of exile. Proud, exclusive, anxious, hurried, 
fond of comforts, coveting popularity, with an ofi'ensive 
ostentation of prudence, it is this worldliness which hardens 
the hearts of men, stops their ears, blinds their eyes, vitiates 
their taste, and ties their hands, so far as the things of God 
are concerned. Let it be true that salvation is easy, and 
that by far the greater number of catholics are saved, it is 
still unhappily true that the relations of the Creator and 
the creature, as put forward in this treatise, are not so uni- 
versally or so practically acknowledged as they ought to be. 



THE WORLD. 363 

Why is this ? Sin is a partial answer. The devil is ano- 
ther partial answer. But I believe worldliness has got to 
answer for a great deal of sin, and for a great deal of devil, 
besides a whole deluge of iniquity of its own, which is per- 
petually debasing good w^orks, hindering perfection, prepa- 
ring materials for sin, assisting the devil in his assaults, 
and working with execrable assiduity against the sacra- 
ments and grace. The w^orld is for ever lowering the hea- 
venly life of the Church. If there ever was an age in which 
this was true, it is the present. One of the most frighten- 
ing features of our condition is, that we are so little fright- 
ened of the W'Orld. The world itself has brought this about. 
Even spiritual books are chiefly occupied with the devil 
and the flesh ; and certain of the capital sins, such as envy 
and sloth, no longer hold the prominent places which they 
held in the systems of the elder ascetics ; and yet they are 
just those vices which contain most of the ungodly spirit 
of the world. The very essence of worldliness seems to 
consist in its making us forget that we are creatures ; and 
the more this view is reflected upon, the more correct will 
it appear. 

When our Blessed Lord describes the days before the 
Flood, and again those which shall precede the end of the 
world. He portrays them rather as times of worldliness than 
of open sin. Men were eating and drinking, marrying and 
giving in marriage : and He says no more. Now none of 
these things are wrong in themselves. We can eat and 
drink, as the apostle teaches us, to the glory of God, and 
marriage was a divine institution at the time of the Flood, 
and is now a Christian Sacrament. In the same way when 
He describes the life of the only person whom the gospel 
narrative follows into the abode of the lost, He sums it up 
as the being clothed in purple and fine linen, and feast- 
ing sumptuously every day. Here again there is nothing 
directly sinful in the actions which He names. It surely 



364 THE WORLD. 

cannot be a mortal sin to have fine linen, nor will a man lose 
a state of grace because he feasts sumptuously every day, 
provided that no other sins follow in the train of this soft 
life. The malice of it all is in its worldliness, in the fact 
that this was all or nearly all the lives of those before the 
flood, of those before the days of anti-Christ, and of the 
unhappy Dives. Life began and ended in worldliness. 
There was nothing for God. It was comprised in the plea- 
sures of the world, it rested in them, it was satisfied by 
them. Its characteristic was sins of omission. Worldli- 
ness might almost be defined to be a state of habitual sins 
of omission. The devil urges men on to great positive 
breaches of the divine commandments. The passions of 
the flesh impel sinners to give way to their passions by such 
dreadful sins, as catch the eyes of men and startle them 
by their iniquity. Worldliness only leads to these things 
occasionally and by accident. It neither scandalizes others, 
nor frightens the sinner himself. This is the very feature 
of it, which, rightly considered, ought to be so terrifying- 
The reaction of a great sin, or the shame which follows it, 
are often the pioneers of grace. They give self-love such 
a serious shock, that under the influence of it men return 
to God. Worldliness hides from the soul its real malice, 
and thus keeps at arm's length from it some of the most 
persuasive motives to repentance. Thus the Pharisees are 
depicted in the Gospel as being eminently worldly. It is 
worldliness, not immorality, which is put before us. There 
is even much of moral decency, much of respectable ob- 
servance, much religious profession ; and yet when our 
Blessed Saviour went among them, they were further from 
grace than the publicans and sinners. They had implicit 
hatred of God in their hearts already, which became ex- 
plicit as soon as they saw Ilim. The Magdalen, the Sama- 
ritan, the woman taken in adultery, — it was these who 
gathered round Jesus, attracted by His sweetness, and 



THE WORLD. 365 

touched by the grace which went out from Him. The 
Pharisees only grew more cold, more haughty, more self- 
opinionated, until they ended by the greatest of all sins, 
the crucifixion of our Lord. For worldliness, when its 
selfish necessities drive it at last into open sin, for the most 
part sins more awfully and more impeniteutly than even 
the unbridled passions of our nature. So again there was 
the young man who had great possessions, and who loved 
Jesus when he saw Him, and wished to follow Him. He 
was a religious man, and with humble scrupulosity ob- 
served the commandments of God ; but when our Lord 
told him to sell and give the price to the poor and to follow 
Him, he turned away sorrowful, and was found unequal to 
such a blessed vocation. Now his refusing to sell his pro- 
perty was surely not a mortal sin. It does not appear that 
our Lord considered him to have sinned by his refusal. It 
was the operation of worldliness. We do not know what 
the young man's future was ; but a sad cloud of misgivings 
must hang over the memory of him whom Jesus invited to 
follow Him, and who turned away. Is he looking now in 
heaven upon that Face, from whose mild beauty he so sadly 
turned away on earth ? 

Thus the outward aspect of worldliness is not sin. Its 
character is negative. It abounds in omissions. Yet 
throughout the Gospels our Saviour seems purposely to 
point to it rather than to open sin. When the young man 
turned away. His remark was, How hard it is for those 
who have riches to enter into the kingdom of heaven. But 
the very fact of our Lord's thus branding worldliness with 
His especial reprobation is enough to show that it is in 
reality deeply sinful, hatefully sinful. It is a life without 
God in the world. It is a continual ignoring of God, a 
continual quiet contempt of His rights, an insolent abate- 
ment in the service which He claims from His creatures. 
Self is set up instead of God. The canons of human re- 
2f2 



366 THE WORLD. 

spect are more looked up to than the Divine Command- 
ments. God is very little adverted to. He is passed over. 
The very thought of Him soon ceases to make the worldly 
man uncomfortable. Indeed all his chief objections to 
religion, if he thought much about the matter, would be 
found a repose on his apprehension of it as restless and 
uncomfortable. But all this surely must represent an im- 
mensity of interior mortal sin. Can a man habitually 
forget God, and be in a state of habitual grace? Can he 
habitually prefer purple garments and sumptuous fare to 
the service of his Creator, and be free of mortal sin ? Can 
he make up a life for himself even of the world's sinless 
enjoyments, such as eating, drinking, and marrying, and 
will not the mere omission of God from it be enough to 
constitute him in a state of deadly sin ? At that rate a 
moral atheist is more acceptable to God than a poor sinner 
honestly but feebly fighting with some habit of vice, to 
which his nature and his past offences set so strongly, that 
he can hardly lift himself up. At that rate the Pharisees 
in the Gospel would be the patterns for our imitation, rather 
than the publicans and sinners ; or at least they would be 
as safe. Or shall we say that faith is enough to save us 
without charity ? If a man only believes rightly, let him 
eat and drink and be gaily clothed, and let him care for 
nothing else, and at least that exclusive love of creatures, 
that omission of the Creator, provided only it issues in no 
other outward acts than his fine dinners and his expensive 
clothes, shall never keep his soul from heaven. His 
purple and his sumptuous feasting shall be his beatific 
vision here, and then his outward morality shall by God's 
mercy hand him on to his second beatific Vision, the 
Vision of the beauty of God, and the eternal ravishment 
of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity! Can this be 
true ? 

Yet on the other hand, we may not make into sins what 



THE WORLD. 867 

God has not made sins. How is this ? it is the awful 
world of inward sin which is the horror of all this worldli- 
ness ! It is possession, worse far than diabolical posses- 
sion, because at once more hideous and more complete. It 
is the interior irreligiousness, the cold pride, the hardened 
heart, the depraved sense, the real unbelief, the more than 
implicit hatred of God, which makes the soul of the worldly 
man an actual, moral, and intellectual hell on earth, hid- 
den by an outward show of faultless proprieties, which 
only make it more revolting to the Eye that penetrates the 
insulting disguise. The secret sins moreover of the worldly 
are a very sea of iniquity. Their name is legion ; they 
cannot be counted. Almost every thought is sin, because 
of the inordinate worship of self that is in it. Almost 
every step is sin, because it is treading underfoot some 
ordinance of God. It is a life without prayer, a life with- 
out desire of heaven, a life without fear of hell, a life with- 
out love of God, a life without any supernatural habits at 
all. Is not hell the most natural transition from such a 
life as this ? Heaven is not a sensual paradise. God is 
the joy, and the beauty, and the contentment there : all is 
for God, all from God, all to God, all in God, all round 
God as the beautiful central fire about which His happy 
creatures cluster in amazement and delight. Whereas in 
worldliness God is the discomfort of the whole thing, an 
intrusion, an unseasonable thought, an inharmonious pres- 
ence like a disagreeable uninvited guest, irritating and 
fatiguing us by the simple demand His presence makes on 
our sufferance and our courtesy. surely such a man has 
sin in his veins instead of blood ! 

Worldliness then is a life of secret sins. It is such an 
irresistible tendency to sin, such a successful encourage- 
ment of it, such a genial climate, such a collection of 
favourable circumstances, such an amazing capability of 
sin, that it breeds actual sins, regularly formed and with 



368 THE WORLD. 

all the theological requirements, by millions and millions. 
If we read what the catechism of the Council of Trent 
says of sins of thought, we shall see how marvellously 
prolific sins can be, and what a pre-eminently devastating 
power sins of thought in particular exercise within the 
soul. In numberless cases open and crying sins must come 
at last. Still we must remember that on the whole thex^e 
are two characteristics which always distinguish sins of 
worldliness from sins of the passions, or sins of direct 
diabolical temptation. The respectability which worldli- 
ness affects leads it rather to satisfy itself in secret sins. 
Indeed its worship of self, its predilection for an easy life, 
would hinder its embarking in sins which take trouble, 
time, and forethought, or which run risks of disagreeable 
consequences, and therefore would keep it confined within 
a sphere of secret sins. And in the next place its love of 
comfort makes it so habitually disinclined to listen to the 
reproaches of conscience, or the teasing solicitations of 
grace, that it passes into the state of a seared conscience, a 
deadened moral sense, with a speed which is unknown even 
to cruelty or sensuality. 

A seared conscience I ^ This is a fearful possibility, and 
yet to use the apostle's expression, "the Spirit manifestly 
saith^' that there is such a thing. It is according to St. 
Paul one of the marks of heresy. It belongs also peculiarly 
to worldliness. To have gone on for such a length of time 
doing wrong that we have at last ceased to advert to its be- 
ing wrong, to sin and for the monitor within to be silent, to 
forget God and not to remember that we are forgetting 
Him, — all this is surely far worse than to be a savage or an 
idolater. But this is to have a seared conscience. This is 
the tendency of worldliness, a tendency which it can de- 
velop with incomparable swiftness. And then where is the 
power of coming right again ? We have drifted away from 

* 1 Tim. iY. 



THE WORLD. 869 

all the sweet facilities of repentance. We have hardened 
ourselves against the ordinary impetus of grace. We have 
made ourselves so unlovely that grace vrould shun us if it 
could. We have sold ourselves to the devil, and he has got 
us safe before the proper time. With most men it is enough 
to say that if they erred, at least they had a good conscience 
about it, or that their conscience told them it was wrong, 
and they are sorry they gave way. But if we have a seared 
conscience, neither of these things avail. We have forgotten 
and pretermitted God : we did so contumeliously at first ; 
but now our habitual contempt has superinduced oblivion : 
it seems as if He were going to retaliate, to pay us back in 
our own coin, and for the present at least to pretermit us. 
We no longer know when we are in danger. We have lost 
our chart. We can tell nothing of our latitude and longi- 
tude. No land is in sight: nothing but a waste of bound- 
less waters. The sun is hidden, and we can take no obser- 
vations. The night is so grim and murky, that not a star 
will give us an indistinct notion where we are ; and the 
needle is snapped, and we know neither north nor south, 
nor east nor west. What are our chances of safety now ? 
There has come upon us the fatal woe of Isaias,* Woe to 
you that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for 
light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and 
sweet for bitter. There is nothing to compare with world- 
liness for vitiating the moral taste. There are some possi- 
bilities on earth which we cannot bear to think of without 
shuddering. It is generally God^s merciful ordinance that 
we should not know them in the individual cases, even 
when we see them. One of these is the possibility of a 
man's going hopelessly out of his mind, when he is in a 
state of mortal sin. If he is to have no intermission of his 
madness, no lucid interval before bis death, if he was 
actually in mortal sin when the last step of his aberration 

* Cap. V. 

24 



370 THE WORLD. 

was completed, and reason had abdicated her throne en- 
tirely, then he is as it were damneid already. He walks 
about the earth a living part of hell. His fate is sealed 
while the sun still shines upon his head, and the flowers 
grow beneath his feet, and the birds sing as he passes. He 
smiles, but he is lost. He sings, but he is the hopeless 
property of God's great enemy. Kindness touches his 
heart, but grace has ebbed from it for ever. He belongs 
to the dismal centre of the earth ; it is only by accident 
that he is walking on its radiant surface. This is one of 
earth's fearful possibilities. And the seared conscience of 
worldliness is a desperately near approach to this. Faith 
is still there, and reason also, and a miracle of grace can 
rouse them both. But are worldly people the likely sub- 
jects of God's miracles? Ah! the sweet miracle of con- 
version haunts the company of publicans and sinners, not 
the undoubting self-sufficiency of this world's pharisees 1 
poor worldling, maliciously and guiltily unsuspecting 
now of thy real state, that man who went mad in mortal 
sin is thy shadow, thy brother, and thy type ! 

Now every one of these phenomena of worldliness may 
be resolved into a forgetfulness that we are creatures. There 
is no look about the life of Dives that he remembered he 
was a creature. There might be, mingled with his charac- 
teristic good nature which made him love his brothers so 
much and give alms to Lazarus, some confused notions of 
duty to a Creator ; but any abiding sense of his being a 
creature there was none. He solved the problem of the 
possibility of these two forgetfuln esses being separated, 
that of having a Creator and that of being a creature. It 
is this forgetfulness which is the fountain of almost all 
sins of omission. A worldly man never looks like a man 
who so lives as having to give an account of himself to a 
higher power. Anything, which should evince a sense of 
an invisible world, would be incongruous in his ordinary 



I HE WORLD. 871 

conduct ; and if from early associations or natural timor- 
ousness of character he should betray any such sense, it 
would instantly take the form of superstition rather than 
that of religion. When the devil tempts a man to a great 
sin of passion, such as murder, or sensuality at last be- 
guiles a man to relapse into his intemperance, in neither 
of these cases does he forget that he is a creature. Indeed 
it is his advertence to the law of his Creator which gives 
the malice to his sin. But there is no struggle in worldli- 
ness. It is a false faith, a false religion. It does not recog- 
nise the rights of the Creator, nor occupy itself with the 
duties of the creature. It begins with self and ends with 
self, and if compelled to lodge an appeal outside itself, it 
appeals to the judgments of human respect. Wherever 
there is worldliness, there is this forgetfulness that we are 
creatures ; and wherever there is this forgetfulness that we 
are creatures, there also is worldliness. 

When a man's sympathies are with a disloyal State rather 
than with the Holy See, there is worldliness. The world is 
preferred before the Church. When men object to the doc- 
trine of religious vocation, and without other reasons than 
a certain instinct, try to hinder their children from entering 
religious orders, there is worldliness. The one work of the 
creature, to do the Creator's will, is overlooked or unac- 
knowledged. When men are ashamed of their religion 
before heretics, especially of its distinctive practices and 
unpopular doctrines, there is worldliness. The creature 
forgets himself, and makes himself the standard of truth. 
Wherever men, who are not to their own sensible cost 
taking up the cross daily and following Christ, inveigh 
against religious enthusiasm or the want of moderation in 
piety, there is worldliness. The creature wants to limit 
the service of the Creator. When men do not give alms, 
or give them scantily, or give them in an eccentric and 
peculiar way, there is worldliness. The creature either 



372 THE WORLD. 

claims as his own what he only holds at the good pleasure 
of his Creator, or he claims to satisfy his own whim and 
caprice in the way in which he pays it back to his Creator. 
Indeed, all developments of worldliness exhibit some obli- 
quity in a man's perception of the true relations between 
the Creator and the creature. Ought we not, then, seriously 
to ask ourselves, if we have any right to be so little afraid 
of worldliness as we are ? If an evil is universal, if it is 
almost imperceptible, if it is generally fatal, if we know it 
to be in the middle of us, and if not suspecting that we 
have it, is, or may be, one of the worst symptoms of our 
having it, does not prudence suggest to us almost an excess 
in caution, almost a nervousness of fear, almost a fanciful- 
ness of apprehension ? Is it well that we should be so calm 
and cool ? Is it certain that our calmness and our coolness 
are not actual proofs of the disease? Worldliness only 
requires one condition for its success, that we should not 
fear it. He who fears God must also fear the world, and 
be who fears the world need never fear that he has lost the 
fear of God. 

It is hard to live in a place and avoid the spirit of it. It 
is hard to live in the world and avoid worldliness. Yet this 
is what we have to do. The world we cannot leave till God 
summons us ; but worldliness, which is the spirit of the 
world, should not be allowed to infect us. As the smell 
of fire had not passed upon the garments of the three 
children in the burning fiery furnace, so must the odor of 
worldliness not pass upon our souls. But to the avoiding 
of w^orldliness, no help is more efficacious than having a 
right and fixed view of the world. There are two views 
of the world which Christians may take, two views which 
are actually taken by those who are striving to serve God 
and to love Him purely. Which of the two views a man 
takes, depends partly upon his early associations, partly 
upon his natural character, and partly upon the circum- 



THE WORLD. 373 

stances of his vocation ; and his spiritual life will he found 
to be considerably modified by the particular view which 
he is led to take. Some take a very gloomy view of the 
world. To them it seems altogether bad, wholly evil, irre- 
deemably lost. Everything is danger: for there is sin 
everywhere. All its roses have thorns under the leaves. 
There is a curse upon everything belonging to it. Its joys 
are only other forms of melancholy. Its sunshine is a 
mockery : its beautiful scenery a deceit : the soothingness 
of its domestic affections a snare. Its life is an incessant 
death. We have no right to smile at anything. The world 
is so dark that it is even a perpetual partial eclipse of God. 
If the present is miserable, let us delay upon it; for in 
misery we shall find food for our souls. If it is joyous, let 
us rush from it into the forebodings of a future, when all 
this world and the fashion of it will be burned up with fire. 
Let us speak low, lest the devil hear us, and use his know- 
ledge to our destruction. Let us live as ancient monarchs 
lived, in daily fear of poison in every dish. A funeral on 
a wet day in a disconsolate churchyard, this is the type of 
the minds who take this view. 

The other view is the very opposite of all this. It is the 
bright view. Those who take it see all creation lying before 
them with the lustre of God^s benediction on it. It is the 
earth on which Jesus was born, and where Mary lived. It 
marvels at the number of exquisite pleasures with which 
it is strewn, so very few of which comparatively are sins. 
The innocent attachments of earthly love are to such men 
helps to love God better. Natural beauty supernaturalizes 
their minds. The sunshine makes them better men. God's 
perfections are seen everywhere written in hieroglyphics 
over the world. Kindness is so abundant, nobility of heart 
so plentiful, the joys of home so pure yet so attractive, the 
successes of the Gospel so infinitely consoling, all things, 
iu I'act, so much better on trial than they seemed, that the 

2g 



374 THE WORLD. 

world appears a happy place, and missing but a little, so 
little it is sad to think how little, of being a holy place also, 
holy from the very abundance of its pure happiness. At 
every turn, there are radiant fountains of joy leaping up, 
to meet us. Each day, like the cystus, has a thousand 
new blossoms to show: it lays them down when evening 
comes, and the next morning it has as gay a show of flowers 
as ever. Even adverse things are wonderfully tempered in 
the present, while in the past they have such a pathetic 
golden light upon them, that the memory of them is one 
of our best treasures, and we would not for worlds not have 
suffered them ; and, as to any evil in the future, there is 
such an inextinguishable light of joy within us, that we 
simply disbelieve it. The clouds fly before us as we go. 
Music sounds around our path. And as to cares, they find 
themselves so little at home with us, that, when we come to 
the night, "they fold up their tents like the Arabs, and as 
silently steal away.'' 

St. Bernard may be called the prophet of the first view, 
St. Francis of Sales of the second. The first seems more 
safe for human presumption ; the second more cheering to 
discouragement. One leads through holy fear to love ; the 
other through holy love to fear. The one disenchants more 
from the world; the other enchants us more with God. 
The one subdues ; the other gives elasticity. The one 
seems more admonitory to man ; the other more honorable 
to God. Both can make saints ; but saints of different 
kinds. Both are true ; yet both are untrue. Both are true 
as far as they go, and both are untrue when they exclude 
the other. They are partial views ; and one is more true 
to each person than the other, because it is more suit- 
able for his character and temper to dwell upon what 
is prominently dark, or prominently bright, as the case 
may be. The great thing is, whichever view we take, to 
have it clearly before us and keep to it consistently, be- 



THE WORLD. 375 

cause of the irresistible influence which these views exer- 
cise upon the spiritual life. They make men pray difle- 
rently, and act differently in their secret relations with God. 
They foster different graces. They give birth to different 
vocations. They supply different motives. The subjects 
for meditation, the subjects for particular examination of 
conscience, have to do with the dark or bright view men 
habitually take of the world. The question between an 
active or a contemplative life is often decided by them. 
They have each their own class of temptations, and their 
own rocks on which they may strike and go down. They 
have each also their own graces, their own beauties, their 
own attractions, their own blessings, and their own short 
roads to heaven. The strange thing is, that no one seems 
to be able to take in impartially the whole view of the 
world, the true view, the bright and dark together. Intel- 
» lectually they may do so ; but practically they must lean 
either to^the dark or bright, exaggerate their own view, and 
do the other view injustice. No mind leaves things unco- 
lored. It is our necessity ; we cannot help ourselves. The 
grand thing is to turn it all to God, and to begin straight- 
way to manufacture heavenly love both out of our darkness 
and our light. 

It is dangerous to talk of general rules in such subject 
matters. But, as upon the whole we find the darker view 
taken by cloistered saints, and the brighter view by secular 
saints, it may not be an error to suppose that the brighter 
view of the world is the best for those who live in the world. 
The dark view may readily become gloomy, and gloom 
leads to inaction, to concentration upon self, to the judging 
of others, to a discontentment with the state of things 
around us ; and the fruit of all this is pride, sourness, want 
of zeal, and self-righteousness. Men with a frustrated vo- 
cation to religion, and living in the world, where they have 
no right to be, are mowstly uncharitable men. Keformers, 



876 THE WORLD. 

good and bad, have for the most part emanated from the 
cloister. Luther was an Augustinian ; Savonarola a Do- 
minican. A monk has beautiful examples of the highest 
virtue constantly before him, which not only urge him on 
in his heroic love of God, but also counteract what there 
might be depressing or unnerving in his melancholy view 
of the world. To him in his circumstances it is a powerful 
stimulus to sanctity. But it would require very peculiar 
circumstances indeed to make it such to persons aiming at 
perfection in the world. They are good ; they love God ; 
they frequent the Sacraments ; they make a mental prayer ; 
they practise voluntary mortifications ; they live under spi- 
ritual direction ; their interests and tastes are in spiritual 
things. Yet for all this they enjoy the world. Many of its 
blameless pleasures are real pleasures to them. They love 
many persons, and many persons love them. Their home- 
circle is bright and tender ; and if it does not lead to God, 
there is no appearance of its leading away from Him. Now 
what will happen if we force them to believe that all is 
misery around them, and that they ought to be miserable 
themselves, and that it is very imperfect of them not to be 
so? The fact is, they are not miserable, and they cannot 
see why they should be so : and moreover they actually 
cannot be miserable, even if they try. Consequently if we 
persist in forcing upon them a view which does not suit 
them, and is against the grain, they either become per- 
plexed and scrupulous, seeing sin where there is no sin, 
and believing the detection of sin to be the highest spiritual 
discernment, and so farewell to their serving God for love ; 
or they start away from a devout life altogether, in disgust 
and impatience, as an unreality, which is based upon a 
false theory, and so worth nothing at all, or as an inflated 
pedantic imposture, which even those who talk big about 
it do not themselves believe. Then as a matter of fact the 
number of things which are sinful is much less than this 



THE WORLD. 377 

view would lead us to suppose ; and a man aiming at per- 
fection in the world is much more exposed than others to 
occasions of sin. Indeed this is one of his chief difficulties, 
the difficulty which in all ages has so blessedly filled the 
cloisters and recruited the congregations of apostolic men. 
But this very fact makes any exaggeration of the matter 
extremely dangerous, as both discouraging and unsettling ; 
and every one knows that in the world, where there is nei- 
ther rule nor vows, discouragement and unsettlement are 
the two most fatal enemies of the spiritual life. The bright 
view is doubtless a better basis for perfection in the world. 
Meanwhile it must guard itself against laxity, and love of 
pleasure, and an inadequate notion of sin, as much as the 
darker view must shun discouragement, self-exaltation, and 
uncharitableness, to which of its own nature it is prone. 
The dark view must not be querulous with God, nor the 
bright view make too free with His perfections. 

Whatever view we take of the w^orld, we must be upon 
our guard against its spirit. Of that spirit Christians can 
have but one view. Inspiration has fixed it for ever; it is 
the enemy of God. No cloisters can hope to keep it out ; for 
it has the gift of subtlety. There is air enough in one 
heart for it to live, and thrive amazingly ! But much more 
are those who live in the world exposed to its dangers. It 
looks so moral, and sometimes, but not often, even gene- 
rous, in order to deceive us. It can talk most reasonably 
and well. It can praise religion, and take its side, though 
there is always an ulterior purpose in view. We see its influ- 
ence in society. Faith deciphers it for us there. We behold a 
system of proprieties with no self-denial in them, a number 
of axioms of doubtful morality gaining ground and passing 
current, a humility which consists in our ruling ourselves 
by the opinions of others, an inventiveness of amusements 
which bewilder our notions of right and wrong ; and in all 
this we can prophesy evil and suspect dangers, while it is 

2g2 



378 THE WORLD. 

hard for us to name the evil and to put our finger on the 
danger. When we look at people outside the Church, we 
see how insinuatingly worldliness prevents their coming 
into it. We can see clearly, what the sufferers themselves 
cannot see at all. We can watch its influence on sinners, 
how artfully it entices them into deep places, how strongly 
it holds them dow^n, how cleverly it throws suspicion upon 
the advances and offers of grace, how variously it contrives 
delays, and when it fails, how hypocritically it can rejoice 
in a man's conversion, how successfully it can lay hold of 
his fresh vigor and high spirits, and how mercilessly it can 
lead him backwards and blindfold into a relapse ! But the 
sinner sees nothing of this himself. If it were told him, it 
would sound in his ears as a romance. 

We can trace the influence of worldliness upon pious 
people. Their frequentation of the sacraments, their 
church-going, their alms-giving, their interest in catholic 
plans, contrast strangely with their anxiety to get into 
society, with their hankering after great people, with their 
excitement about marriages, with the perpetual running of 
their conversation on connections, wealth, influence, and 
the like, and their unconscious but almost gross respect for 
those who are very much richer than themselves, or very 
much higher than themselves. It would never do for them 
to sit for a picture of catholic devotion. Yet they do not 
see all this, and they are really full of God, always talking 
of Him, always planning for Him, always fidgetty about 
His glory. Sometimes a step further is taken, and we see 
a most portentous union of piety and worldliness, really 
as if one person were two persons, one person in church, 
and another person out of church, one person with priest 
and religious, and another person with worldly company. 
These people make the oddest compensations to themselves 
for their pious self-denials, and again with such grotesque 
earnestness penance their worldliness in revenge for its 



THE WORLD. 379 

inroads upon their piety, that they remind us of the stories 
protestants tell us of the Italian bravos, who, before they 
commit a murder, most devoutly recommend it to the Ma- 
donna. Yet God and the world keep the peace so unbro- 
kenly in their hearts, that they have hardly a suspicion of 
the incongruous appearance they present to others, still 
less of the horrible reality of their spiritual condition. 
Now if we can see all this in others, is it at all likely that 
we are free from it ourselves ? depend upon it, there is 
no freedom but in excessive fear, no security but in a weary 
vigilance ! It is heavy work always to be keeping guard. 
But there is no sleep in the enemy^s camp, and we are in a 
war which knows neither peace nor truce. The night is 
both cold and long, and if divine love keep us not awake, 
what else is there that will ? 

It may very naturally be now objected that the conclu- 
sion of this chapter tends to destroy the conclusion of the 
last, that if worldliness accounts for the widely spread 
denial of those relations of Creator and creature which have 
been shown to be true, so it will not allow us to suppose 
that the majority of catholics are saved, when worldliness 
is at once so universal, and so deadly to the soul. But this 
by no means follows. What has been said of the obtru- 
siveness of evil and the hiddenness of good, and of the 
graces which visit old age, sickness, and death, applies as 
well to worldliness as to sin. No ! the conclusion, which 
might seem to follow from this doctrine of worldliness, 
would be, that very far from a majority of the rich among 
catholics would be saved. But the rich are a mere handful 
compared to the multitudinous poor. So that, even allow- 
ing the stern conclusion to be drawn that very few rich 
persons are saved, even among catholics, the conclusion of 
the preceding chapter would remain unshaken. Many 
writers have taken this startling view. Lacordaire, in 
making up his majority of the saved, lays the chief stress 



380 THE AVORLD. 

on children, women, and the countless poor.^ Bossuet, 
commenting on the words of the seventy-first psalm, He 
shall judge the poor of the people and He shall save the 
children of the poor, draws a picture similar to that of 
Lacordaire.f Fromond, in his commentary on the catholic 
epistles, enters upon the question of the number of the 
saved when he is explaining the thirteenth verse of the second 
chapter of St. James, and one of the arguments which he 
brings forw^ard in support of the more gloomy view is, 
that " although perhaps a majority of the faithful do not 
die without the sacrament of penance, yet very many 
worldly people (plerique mundani) do not receive the fruit 
of the sacrament ;'' and the reason he gives for this opinion 
is, that their appreciation of riches, honors, pleasures, and 
other earthly goods is too high and fixed for their sorrow 
for sin easily to rise to that appreciation of its malignity, 
which theology requires even in the adequate attrition for 
absolution. J Palafox also, in his book on Devotion to St. 
Peter, teaches the same doctrine in his comparison of the 
prodigal son, and the young man who went away sorrow 
ful. It was his appreciation of riches which hindered his 
appreciation of God, and it was the prodigaVs freedom 
from this which on the other hand facilitated his conver- 
sion. | There is no doubt that our Lord^s woes pronounced 
upon the rich are among the most painful and terrific mys- 
teries of the Gospel, and should drive rich men into that 
facile, prompt, various, unasked, abundant, and self-deny- 
ing almsgiving for the love of God, in which alone their 
safety consists. But, so far as the present question is con- 
cerned, I express no opinion as to whether a very small 
minority of rich catholics are saved ; I do not know enough 
of the world to form a judgment, and my little experience 

* Conferences, iv. 178, et seqq. f (Euvres. rii. 442. 

X Migue. Cursus Sacra) Scripturje, Tom. xxv. col. 682. 
§ Palafox. Excellencias de San Pedro, lib. iii. cap. 9. 



THE WORLD. 381 

of the rich would go the other way : I only say that even 
if this melancholy belief be true, it by no means destroys 
the previous conclusion that the numerical majority of 
catholics are saved. 

But to conclude, there are certain things which it is im- 
portant to note with regard to worldliness, and which can- 
not be too often repeated. The first is, that even spiritual 
persons for the most part greatly under-estimate its danger. 
They have not a sufficiently intelligent belief in its uni- 
versality, in its subtlety, in its power of combining with good 
in the most imperceptible Cjuantities, and then spoiling it, 
or in its peculiar aptness for fixing itself just upon the 
very persons who consider themselves decidedly free from 
it. Spiritual discernment is a rare gift, and one which 
belongs only to those whose hearts are all for God. It is 
the great art of the world to persuade men that it is not 
so dangerous as it is described, and that with monks it is 
a sort of pious fashion to abuse the world, while with 
preachers it is simply an affair of rhetoric. This persuasion 
is its triumph. Nothing more is needed. When you have 
under-estimated its danger, you are already its victim. 

In the second place, as men are very apt not to know 
worldliness even when they see it, and as it is not an easy 
matter always to be paying attention to the atmosphere 
we breathe, it is of great importance to have well-ascer- 
tained principles. It is astonishing how few men are in 
possession of such. An almost incredible amount of ex- 
cellent efibrt comes to nothing great, because it is at ran- 
dom, and by fits and starts, and operating inconsistently 
with its antecedents. The really powerful man in the world 
is the consistent man, the man of ascertained principles and 
of adjusted views. The world, like a suspicious potentate, is 
always proposing concordats. We are asked first for one 
compromise, then for another. We do not know when we 
have passed the line which involved a principle, and so we 



382 THE WORLD. 

discover, that we have committed ourselves to something, 
in which it is impossible for us to keep our word without 
surrendering our independence altogether. Now with 
ascertained principles we have settled all this at the outset. 
Even when we get beyond the extent of our knowledge, or 
the sphere of our experience, we know what to suspect and 
where to be upon our guard. Our instincts are right, and 
what is practically of greater importance, they are consist- 
ent also. Thus we do not fall into the world^s power, and 
are never taken unawares, and have not to give offence by 
having to retrace our steps. Thus when we change our 
state of life, or enter upon a new department of duty, or 
come to a crisis in life, our relations with the world are 
more or less altered ; and if we have then to hesitate and 
linger, settling our future mode of operations and mapping 
out the country before us, because we have no ascertained 
principles, every step we take, (and we cannot stand still, 
this is not a world for that work,) we are putting on record 
some precedent against ourselves. An inconsistent great 
man is an impotent creature in practical matters, while a 
consistent moderate man does the work of a great one. 
Above all a man should have ascertained principles of prac- 
tical religion, if religion is to be the business of his life. It 
is deplorable for the cause of God on earth, that such men 
are so few. 

In the third place, if ascertained principles are of such im- 
portance to us in this respect, and if the power of our faith 
depends materially either on its simplicity or its intelli- 
gence, and if our faith is " the victory which overcometh 
the world,^' it is of great consequence that we should know 
and study our religion well. In these days there is an im- 
mense amount of information, floating in society, regarding 
the controversies of the Church and the world. They are 
now daily coming more into collision, in questions of 
politics, in systems of beneficence, in the statistics of crime, 



i 



THE WORLD, 883 

in the doctrines of progress, in the discoveries of science, 
in the quarrels of the metaphysical schools, and in the 
new shapes of old controversies between the Church and 
the dissident sects around her. The world has a power 
and a purchase in the anti-church side of all these ques- 
tions ; and it is so tempting to be moderate, so pleasant to 
yield, so hard to prove, so weary to argue, so unnatural to 
confess our own ignorance, that an educated modern catho- 
lic who does not study the doctrines of his religion, as care- 
fully as the subject-matter of his profession, will hardly es- 
cape betraying God sometimes, and getting on the wrong 
side without intending it. Even a study of theology, at 
least to some extent, is of considerable utility, in this par- 
ticular light, as a safeguard against worldliness. It is pro- 
verbial that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing ; but 
this is less true of theology than it is of any other science, 
because the least acquaintance with it deepens our view of 
our own ignorance, and it breathes such an odor of God that 
intellectual bashfulness would seem to be its special gift, 
increasing as our studies penetrate nearer and nearer to those 
divine abysses, into which knowledge may not descend 
until it has been metamorphosed into love. A man, who 
has finished his education in these days without having 
acquired a profound intellectual respect for his religion, is 
the most likely of all men to become the prey of an unbe- 
lieving and ungodly world, and to betray his Lord without 
intending it, and then to grow angry, and turn away in 
proud dislike from Him whom he has thus betrayed. 

In the last place, it is honestly to be confessed, that all 
these things do but form an armor against the spirit of 
the world. They are not a victory over it. Moreover it is 
an armor which is by no means invulnerable. The weight 
of the arms and the weariness of the fight have laid many 
a warrior low, from whom no blood had flowed, but whose 
very bones the heavy fall had cruelly broken. Many a 



384 THE WORLD. 

spear, that could not penetrate the cunning joints of the 
suit of mail, has unseated the rider, and left him lifeless 
beneath his charger's feet. So all these helps, which have 
been here suggested, are not infallible ; nay, they are but 
auxiliaries for a season ; and for all their worth, the w^orld 
may, and most likely will, take us captive in the end. 
There is no redemption for the creature but in the service 
of the Creator. There is no power to counteract the mani- 
fold spirit of evil but one, and that is the desire of God, the 
craving to see His Face, the yearning for His beauty. There 
is no specific against worldliness but God. 



OUR OWN GOD. 885 



CHAPTER IV 



OUR OWN GOD. 



Aid Sfj Kai iig avTov evicrpaTTai ra Gvunavra, aaX^ff^ fivl ttoOu} koI 
appfjTco aropY^ npog tov up^riyov rrjs ^(arjg Kai '^oprjyov ai:o^\t~ovTa, 

S.JBasiZ 

The Creator is the creature's home. Neither spirit of 
angel nor soul of man can rest short of God. They can 
anchor nowhere save in the capacious harbor of His infinite 
perfections. All things teach us this beautiful truth. All 
things that find us wandering lead us home again, to the 
Bosom of our Eternal Father. The three distinct orders 
of nature, grace, and glory, if the two last may indeed be 
called distinct, all in their own respective ways, at once 
teach us this comforting and saving truth, and help us also 
to practice what they teach. The natural joy of beautiful 
scenery, the strong grace of Christian holiness, and the thrill 
of glory which passes through our souls from the unveiled 
Face of God, all, in degrees almost infinitely apart, draw 
us home to God, or keep us there. God is our Last End as 
well as our First Cause. that the day were come when 
we shall be securely at His Feet for ever ! 

God is included in the idea of creation as our Last End 
as well as our First Cause. It is as our Creator that He 
is both the one and the other. We have seen that creation 
was simply love, a love which called our natures out of 
nothing, a love which gave them all that was due to them, 
a love which gave them grace which was not due for them, 
a love which in matter of fact destined them to a glory 
25 2h 



886 OUR OWN GOD. 

•which is far beyond our natural capacities. All the three 
orders of nature, grace, and glory were represented in the 
act of creation, nature from the very necessity of the case, 
grace because as a matter of fact God created both angels 
and men in a state of grace,"^ glory because it was for His 
glory that we were necessarily created, and, as a matter of 
fact, in the exuberant goodness of His decrees, for the 
special, but not necessary, glory of the Beatific Yision. 

The angels were created all at once, and because of their 
excellent perfections, and especially the perfect knowledge 
which they had of themselves, they rapidly exercised their 
free will, completed the course of their probation, and 
entered into the rest and enjoyment of the Creator^s 
beauty. Men are created slowly and by successive genera- 
tions, and from the great inferiority of their rational nature 
to the vast intelligences of the angels, they require the re- 
volution of many centuries before their numbers are com- 
pleted, their destinies fulfilled, and the whole of the elect 
enter into the everlasting joy of God. Both these creations 
of angels and men were created simply for God's own 
glory; but His glory was the creature's bliss, because His 
glory was to have rational children who should be like 
Himself and be made participators of His beatitude. But 
as we cannot be participators of His joy by any natural 
beatitude, however exquisite and satisfying, and as Plis 
very first intention in creation was that we should partici- 
pate in His own beatitude, it follows that His very inten- 
tion in creation already involved both grace and glory ; and 
this is the explanation of the beautiful and touching 
mystery of our being created in a state of grace originally. 
So nature involved grace, not necessarily, but in the 
designs of creative love, and grace looked on to glory, and 
prophesied of it to free-will, and more than prophesied of 
it, for it was the capacity of glory and its beginning. 

■^ Throughout the whole Treatise the opinion of St. Bonayenture as to the 
creation of the angels has heen assumed to be incorrect. 



OUR OWN GOD. 387 

Because God is infinitely good and infinitely perfect, He 
is by His nature, so to speak, bent upon the communica- 
tion of Himself; and this communication of Himself is, as 
theologians tell us, twofold, a natural communication, and 
a free communication. The natural one, as it is altogether 
necessary, is eternal. It is that by which the Father com- 
municates to the Son His whole essence, power, wisdom, 
goodness, and beatitude, and the Father and the Son to the 
eternally proceeding Spirit. It takes place in the produc- 
tion of the Word through the intellect, and of the Spirit 
through the will ; and each of these processions is so perfect 
and full, that by it the whole good, which is communicated, 
is as perfectly possessed by Him who receives as by Him 
who communicates it. The free communication of God is 
temporal, and takes place in creation, and creation is in 
order to it, and it takes place first, and foremost, and emi- 
nently, in the Hypostatic Union, and then in the gifts of 
grace and glory ; and God^s communication of Himself, 
which in the act of creation was not supernatural, was 
with a view to what was supernatural, and, as a matter of 
fact, was not disjoined from it in act. To this, therefore, 
says Lessius, did God of Himself incline, that is, of His 
own goodness, setting aside all merit and all necessity of 
the creature. This communication begins in this life by 
the gifts of grace, especially fiiith, hope, and charity; by 
which virtues we are not only made like to God, but God 
also is united to us. It is perfected however in the next 
life by the gifts of glory, namely, the light of glory, the 
vision of the Divinity, beatific love, and beatific joy. For 
by these we attain our highest possible similitude to God, 
and become perfectly the sons of God, and deiform, 
shining like the Divinity, and exhibiting in ourselves the 
most excellent image of the Holy Trinity. For by the 
light of glory we are made like the Father ; by the vision 
of the divine Essence and divine Persons we become like 



388 OUR OWN GOD. 

the Son ; by beatific love we are made like thp Holy 
Ghost; by joy we become like the Godhead in beatitude, 
and the participation of the divine beatitude is completed 
in us."^ 

When we speak of God^s glory we may mean one or 
more of four things. First of all, His glory may be either 
intrinsic or external ; and then each of those may be of 
two kinds also. God's own excellence, His own oeauty, 
the infinity of His perfections in Himself, is as it were the 
objective glory of God, which is intrinsic to Himself; 
whereas His own knowledge of Himself, His own love of 
Himself, and His own joy in Himself, which are also in- 
trinsic, are what theology terms His formal glory. The 
beauty of creation, the perfections of creatures, their loveli- 
ness, their number, their adaptations, even their color and 
form, are the external glory of God, represented objectively, 
whereas the knowledge of Him, the love of Him, and the 
joy in Him, which His rational creatures have, is His for- 
mal external glory. It is necessary to put these hard words 
together, in order to understand the practical conclusions 
to which we shall be coming presently. 

Now we say that God is necessitated to do everything 
for His own glory, and that though the creation of the 
world was perfectly free, yet, granting that it was to be 
created by God, it must of necessity be created for His 
glory. This is almost venturing to say that He could not 
help Himself, at least as to the end for which He created. 
But oh ! what joy the creature will find at last in this very 
necessity, which God is under, of doing everythmo; for His 
own glory ! That God has created the world is a fact. It 
is contradictory not to His wisdom only, but to every one 
of His perfections, that He should have created it without 
an object at all. It is impossible to Him, as God, to have 
any other end but Himself. It is contrary to the plenitude 

* Lessius de Perfect. Divin. lib. xiv. 



OUR OWN GOD. 389 

of Ilis self-sufficiency, that He should have created it in 
order to gain from it conveniences which He has not now, 
or joys which He does not already possess ; for these are 
intrinsic to Himself. But it is possible for Him to have a 
glory extrinsic to Himself, over and above that which is 
intrinsic. On the other hand, it is impossible for Him to 
have anything else extrinsic to Himself, which creation 
could give Him, except glory. Even then the glory is not 
necessary to Him, and does not make Him more blessed or 
more self-sufficient than He was ; at best it is only con- 
gruous to His Divine Majesty to have it. Thus it is that 
God is necessitated to do all things for His own glory. He 
is limited to this by the very plenitude of His perfections. 
As nothing exists in the world without the influx of His 
omnipresence, supporting it and keeping it above the abyss 
of nothingness, into which of itself it is falling back ever- 
more, so also nothing exists in the world, which is not in- 
volved in and depending upon God^s glory. Even the per- 
missions of sin glorify Him, for without them the wills of 
His creatures would not be free. 

While God was thus under the necessity of creating all 
things for His glory, if He created at all, much more is the 
creature under the necessity of glorifying God in all things. 
But it was not necessary for God to raise the creature to the 
special glory of the Beatific Vision. It was not due to his 
nature, not to the highest angelic nature. It was beyond 
it ; and it was beyond it not in degree only, but in kind 
also. It belonged to another order than that of nature. It 
was superadded to nature. Nature had to receive another 
order, that of grace, before it could be capable of the third 
order, that of glory. Wonderful things had to be done to 
it, in order to habilitate it for such a possibility as the sight 
of God. But the remarkable thing is, that these things were 
done in the act of creati(jn. The orders both of nature and 
of grace started in that one act of divine benignity. It was 
2h2 



890 OUK OWN GOD. 

sin only, which separated what God had put together. The 
rebellious angels sinned, and so lost their primal grace, and 
having no fresh trial given them, forfeited thereby forever 
the order of glory. Man sinned, and in him also the two 
orders became separated, and the whole magnificent appa- 
ratus of redeeming love is God's invention to unite them 
again, so that men may become capable of the order of 
glory. Not that this is the sole reason or the whole expla- 
nation of the Incarnation, but only of redemption. Thus, 
it is absolutely necessary, when we are thinking of creation, 
to bear in mind the fact, that God created angels and men 
in a state of grace, and not in a state of pure nature. We 
are not concerned with other possible creations, but only 
with our own creation ; and the creations of both those 
angelic and human families of rational creatures, united in 
the church under the single headship of Jesus, were accom- 
plished in a state of grace ; and they were so, because glory, 
and the especial supernatural glory of a participation in His 
own beatitude, entered into God's first intention and origi- 
nal idea, as Creator. We shall never understand creation, 
if we let this fact out of sight for a moment.^ 

The inanimate and irrational creations glorify God by the 
very splendor of the beauty in which He has clothed them. 
They glorify Him by their adaptation and subservience to 
man. Their abundance in their kinds, and their many 
kinds, which are over and above what are necessary to 
man, is another glory of their Creator, by being in some 
sort a picture of His copious magnificence. They glorify 
Him, also, by bearing on themselves the seal and signet of 
His Divinity, and even of His Trinity in Unity, and their 
degree of goodness depends on the degree in which they 
adumbrate the divine perfections. But much more does the 
rational creation glorify its Creator. By its very existence 

* Charitas est ergo causa efficiens creaturas rationalis, et participatio 
divinae bonitatis est causa finalis. — Harphius, 



I 



OUR OWN GOD. 391 

it represents God, as the inanimate and irrational creations 
do. But by its intelligence it knows God, and with its 
knowledge loves Him ; and by its will it loves Him, and 
with its love enjoys Him. Thus, the knowledge, love, and 
joy of the rational creatures, the three things by which 
they chiefly shadow forth the Holy Trinity, praise and 
admire and worship the Divine Nature, all which is the 
rendering glory to Him. By these three things, they, as it 
were, enter into God and rest in Him, through the gifts of 
grace and glor3% But let us hear Lessius. In these three 
acts resides God's chiefest glory, which He Himself intended 
in all His works ; and so likewise in the same acts reside 
the highest good and formal beatitude of men and angels. 
By these acts, the blessed spirits are elevated infinitely 
above themselves, and, in their union with God, become 
deiform, by a most lofty and super-eminent similitude with 
God, so that the mind can conceive no greater one. Thus, 
like very Gods, they shine to all eternity as the sons of glory 
and the divine brightness. By those same acts, they expand 
themselves into immensity, so as to be co-equal and co-exten- 
sive, as far as may be, to so great a good, that they may take 
it in and comprehend it all. They will not linger outside, as 
it were, upon the surface of it, but they go down ihto its 
profound depths, and enter into the joy of their Lord; some 
more, some less, according to the magnitude of the light 
of glory which is communicated to each. Immersed in this 
abyss, they lose themselves and all created things ; for all 
other goods and joys seem to them as nothing, by the side 
of this ocean of goods and joys. In this abyss there is to 
them no darkness, no obscurity, such as hangs about the 
Divinity to us now; but all is light and immense serenity, 
although they are not able fully tocomprehend it. There 
is their eternal mansion, with a tranquil security that they 
shall never fail. There is the heaven of heavens, in com- 
parison with which all creation is but dross. There is the 



392 OUR OWN GOD, 

fulfilling of all their desires ; there the possession and frui- 
tion of all things that are desirable. There nothing will 
remain to be longed for, or sought for more ; for all will 
firmly possess and exquisitely enjoy ev6ry good thing in 
God. There the whole occupation of the saints will be to 
contemplate the infinite beauty of God, to love His infinite 
goodness, to enjoy His infinite sweetness, to be filled to 
overflowing with the torrent of His pleasures, and to exult 
with an unspeakable delight in His infinite glory, and in 
all the goods which He and they possess. Hence comes 
perpetual praise, and benediction, and thanksgiving; and 
thus all the Blessed, arrived at the consummation of their 
desires, and, knowing not what more to crave, rest in God, 
as their Last End.^ 

Thus does creation come home, like a weary bird to its 
roost, to rest in its Creator. And then all movements cease, 
all vicissitudes, changes, progresses, aspirations, discove- 
ries ; and all is rest within, without, around, the kingdom 
of eternal peace. Then the vSon gives up the kingdom to 
His Father, as the Apostle speaks ;t and the subjection of 
His Human Nature, which had been, as it were, veiled in 
the government of the Church and in the pomp of judg- 
ment, becomes more apparent; and then, as if this last act 
of unspeakable subjection on the part of that Created Na- 
ture, which is the Head and First-born of all creatures, 
were the crowning beauty of creation, God the Creator 
becomes all in all, and the chronicles of this creation close. 
Beyond that, all is lost in the indistinguishable radiance of 
eternity. Such is the history of creation, as theology ven- 
tures to conceive it lying in the divine mind. It is a work 
of simple love, of gigantic dimensions, with the most beau- 
tiful proportion in all its parts, and the most exquisite finish 
in every detail. Love is the life of it, from first to last ; and 

* Lessius, lib. xiv. f 1 Cor. xv. 



I 



OUR OWN GOD. 393 

its result is an abiding, immortal, created counterpart of 
the eternal, uncreated, and undivided Trinity. 

If we have taken the pains to master this somewhat 
difficult account of creation, we shall see that it is, as it 
were, the frame within which all the relations of the Crea- 
tor and the creature, which have occupied the preceding 
chapters, are enclosed. It will make some things plain, 
which perhaps were not plain before; and it will itself be 
the easier to understand from what has gone before. Even 
the horror of worldliness will now become more apparent, 
and its danger more alarming. But what is the conclusion 
to which it all leads ? That religion must necessarily be a 
service of love ; that the easiness of salvation comes of its 
being a personal love of God ; and that the only security 
from worldliness is also in a personal love of God. It is nei- 
ther the wonderful character of its doctrines, nor the pure 
simplicity of its precepts, nor the supernatural power of its 
assistances, which make religion what it is, but the fact of 
its being the creature's personal love of the Creator. This 
is an obvious thing to say ; and yet such consequences flow 
from it that it must be still more insisted on. 

That all holiness should consist in a personal love of God 
flows out of the very tie of creation. Creation was an act 
of love, forestalling or including all other loves whatever. 
The creature was at once put by the act of creation into 
various personal relations to the Creator, all of which were 
of the very tenderest and most intimate description. It 
flows also out of the knowledge which the creature has of 
the Creator, and the motives for his personal love of Him 
increase with the amount of that knowledge. Each per- 
fection pleads for love. Each puts a price on love, and on 
nothing else but love. Love is the one want of all God's 
attributes, if we may call it want, and the supplying of that 
one want is the sole worship of the creature. The easiness 
of salvation showed that all religion must be a personal 



394 OUR OWN GOD. 

love of God. It was easy just because this was all. The 
end of all its sacraments and graces was to infuse or to 
elicit that love, and the more of it they infused and the 
more of it they elicited, the more did they contribute to the 
facility of the triumph. Sin teaches us that all is nothing- 
worth but personal love of God, both because its forgiveness 
is the sweetest preacher of divine love on earth, and because 
the horror of its punishment is the total loss of love in that 
dark godless hell which is its end. The personality of the 
evil spirit drives us also into personal love of God, as our 
security and refuge. The dangers of the world are to be 
met in no other way than by the personal love of God. It 
is only the love of Him which can kill unworthy loves. It 
is only the desire of Him which can turn the soul away 
sick, and dispirited, Avith the perishable goods of earth. It 
is only the light of His beauty which can dim and dishonor 
the flaunting, garish beauty of the world, or make us se- 
cretly and sweetly discontented with its lawful, natural, 
and blameless loveliness. But most of all does this neces- 
sity of a personal love of God flow out of the fact, that God 
Himself, and not any of His created rewards, is our Last 
End. God Possessed, our own God, that is creation^s home, 
that is our last end, there only is our rest. that the 
winds of grace would blow that we might sail more swiftly 
over this broad sea to our eternal home ! Another day is 
gone, another week is passed, another year is told. Blessed 
be God then, we are nearer to the end. It comes swiftly ; 
yet it comes slowly too. Come it must, and then it will all 
be but a dream to look back upon. But there are stern 
things to pass through ; and to the getting well through 
them, there goes more than we can say. One thing we 
know, that personal love of God is the only thing which 
reaches God at last. Other things, — they look wise, they 
begin well, they sound good — but they wander ; they are 
on no path ; they go aside, or they fall behind, but home 



OUR OWN GOD. 395 

they never come. To love, the way is neither hard to find, 
nor hard to tread ; for so it is that love never comes home 
tired. It gets to God through the longest life more fresh, 
more eager, more venturous, more full of youth, more 
brimming with expectation, than the day is started amid 
the excesses and inexperiences of its first conversion. 

No one denies this doctrine of the necessity of personal 
love of God. It could not be denied without heresy. But 
there are two different schools of spirituality which treat it 
very differently ; indeed whose difference consists in their 
different treatment of it."^ All are agreed that as the proof 
of love is the keeping of the commandments, so the sense 
of duty, the brave determination to do always and only 
what is right, and because it is right, must go along with 
and be a part of personal love of God.f Personal love of 
God without this would be a falsehood and a mockery. 
They who dwell most strongly on the sense of duty do not 
omit personal love of God ; and they who lay the greatest 
stress on love both imply and secure the keen sense of right- 
fulness and duty. But much depends on which of the two 
we put foremost. It is possible by dwelling exclusively on 
love to make religion too much a matter of mere devotions, 
an affair of sentiments and feelings, highly strung and 
therefore brittle, overstrained and so shortlived. It is pos- 
sible, on the other hand, that by laying all the stress on 
duty, especially with young persons or again with sinners, 

* A whole string of consequences seem to follow in ascetical theology from 
the doctrine of Yasquez, Naturam rationalem esse regulam honestatis. The 
common teaching, however, is against him. See Yasq. i. 2, disp. 58, 2. and 
disp. 97, 3. 

f To the doctrine that a good action is essentially and intrinsically good, 
Medina objects, Si quis velit amare Deum, et non ex motivo, quod hoc sit 
conforme legi divinae id praecipienti, adhuc ponit actum honestum et honum. 
Yiva replies, Qui amat Deum, et non ex motivo honestatis, ponit actum 
honestum, sed non ponit actum honestum honeste. De Actibus Humanis, 
q.a. ii. 



396 OUR OWN GOD. 

the true motive of duty may not have fair play, and the 
peculiar character of the Gospel be overlooked or inade- 
quately remembered. We must pursue such and such a 
line of conduct because it is commanded, because it is 
right, because it will win us respect, because it will enable 
us to form habits of virtue, because it will edify, because 
we cannot otherwise go to communion, because we shall be 
lost eternally if we do not pursue it. This is quite intelli- 
gible, and it is all very true, but not particularly persua- 
sive, especially to those whom youth makes ardent, or those 
whom sin has made invalids. We must pursue such and 
such a line of conduct because it is the one which God 
loves, and God loves us most tenderly, and has loved us 
from all eternity, and God yearns that we should love Him, 
and He catches at our love as if it were a prize, and repays 
it with a fondness which is beyond human comprehension, 
and it grieves His love, and He makes it a personal matter, 
if we swerve from such conduct, and if we only love, all will 
be easy. This also is intelligible, and very true, and also 
very persuasive, and has a wonderful root of perseverance 
in it. But it comes to pass that, while both views are very 
true, they nevertheless form quite different characters. So 
that it is one of the most important practical questions of 
our whole lives, to settle whether we will love God because 
it is right, or whether we will do right because God loves 
us and we love Him. 

Strange to say, while both these views are true, they 
look, as we examine the working out of them, like two diffe- 
rent religions. The fact is, that for some reason or other, 
it is very hard to persuade a man or for him to persuade 
himself that God loves him. The moment that fact be- 
comes a part of his own sensible convictions, a perfect re- 
volution has been worked in his soul. Everything appears 
different to him. He has new lights, and feels new powers. 
Faculties in him, which were well nigh dormant, wake np 



OUR OWN GOD. 397 

and do great things. He is a new man. It is a kind of 
conversion. However good be was before, bowever regular, 
bowever conscientious, bowever devotional, be feels tbat 
tbe change which has passed over him is in some sense a 
veritable conversion. He is on a new line, and will hence- 
forth move differently. Many go to their graves without 
at all realising practically the immense love which God has 
for them. It has been a want in them all through their 
lives, and they would have been higher in heaven bad they 
known on earth what heaven has now taught them. A 
theologian says, that it is one of the weaknesses even of 
the saints, tbat they cannot believe in tbe greatness of God's 
love for them. It is related in tbe chronicles of the Fran- 
ciscans, that, until her director with some difficulty unde- 
ceived her, St. Elizabeth of Hungary thought that she loved 
God more than He loved her. In truth tbe very immensity, 
the excesses, the apparent extravagancies of God's love, 
stand in its own light, and binder men from believing it as 
they should. They hardly dare to do so ; for it seems in- 
credible tbat God should love us as He is said to do. It is 
the grand date in everybody's life, when tbe knowledge 
that his Creator loves him passes into a sensible con- 
viction. 

If all tbe evil tbat is in the world arises from the want 
of a practical acknowledgment of the true relations be- 
tween the Creator and tbe creature, it is equally true, that 
from tbe same want comes all that is deficient in our 
spiritual lives ; and furthermore, tbe true relations between 
the Creator and the creature are more readily appreciated, 
more lovingly embraced, and more perseveringly acted out, 
on the system which puts love first and duty second, which 
does right because God loves us, rather than loves God be- 
cause it is right. Religion, no doubt, comes to persons in 
different ways. Different parts of it attract different minds. 
Men begin in various places in religion. There is not ex- 

2i 



398 OUR OWN GOD. 

actly any one normal beginning of being pious. We should 
never think therefore of condemning, or throwing the 
slightest slur, on any method which succeeded in securing 
the continuous keeping of God's commandments upon 
supernatural motives. This must be borne in mind, toge- 
ther with the full admission both of the safety and sound- 
ness of the other principle, while we state the reasons for 
preferring that school of spirituality, which puts forward 
most prominently the personal love of God, and dwells 
upon it to all persons and at every turn. It seems of the 
two the most likely to advance the Creator\s glory, first by 
saving a greater number of souls, and secondly by swelling 
the ranks of those who generously aim at perfection. 

Love sharpens our eyes, and quickens all the senses of 
our souls. Now when we dwell very exclusively on the 
sense of duty, and urge people to learn to do right just be- 
cause it is right, we seem often to be wanting in the deli- 
cacy and fineness of our spiritual discernment. We are 
not always on God's side, because we do not instantaneously 
and instinctively apprehend on which side He is. We do 
not prophetically see the evil, which is as yet invisible and 
implicit in some line of action. Our spiritual tastes are 
blunt, sometimes inclining to be gross. We do not at once 
detect worldliness in its first insidious aggressions. Love 
has a specialty for all these things ; and conscientiousness 
often runs aground in shallow places, where love sails 
through, finding deep water with an almost supernatural 
skill. The duty principle, if it is allowable so to name it 
shortly for convenience sake, is more apt to grow weary 
than love. It is always against the grain of our corrupt 
nature, and consequently we are obliged to be always 
making efi'orts, in order to keep ourselves up to the mark ; 
and when times of dryness or seasons of temptations come, 
these efi'orts are not easy to sustain. Love on the contrary 
is a stimulant. It has a patent for making things easy. It 



OUR OWN GOD. 399 

invigorates us, and enables us to do hard things with a 
sensible sweetness and a religious pleasure, when mere 
conscientiousness would fail through the infirmity of its 
own nature. Thus perseverance is more congruous to the 
conduct which proceeds on the principle of love, than to 
that which looks prominently to duty. Moreover where 
there is effort, there is seldom abundance, while it is the 
characteristic of love to be prolific. 

It is necessary for us when we act entirely from a sense 
of duty to go through many more intellectual processes 
than when we act from love. We have to investigate the 
character of the action, to ascertain its bearings, to inform 
ourselves of its circumstances, to guess its consequences. 
All this takes time and makes a man slow, and as life runs 
rapidly, he is apt to be taken by surprise, and either be 
guilty of some omission, or act in a hurry at the last. This 
is the reason why slow men are often so precipitate. Any 
one who observes will see instances of this daily, in the 
habitual impetuosities of timid men. The duty principle, 
also, only sails well in fine weather. It does not do for 
storms. It wants elasticity and buoyancy, and so, when it 
has fallen into sin, it recovers itself with great difficulty, 
and is awkward in its repentance, as if it were in a position 
for which it never was intended. It soon despairs. Sin 
seems a necessity, and a few serious relapses are enough to 
make it give up the spiritual life altogether. There are 
cases of men who never could recover one mortal sin ; and 
we should be inclined to suspect that they were mostly cases 
of men who acted from conscience in preference to love."^ 

* Even conscience acts rather by love of the beauty of virtue than by 
hatred of the malice of vice. Antoine says, Voluntas aversari non potest 
objectum malum propter solam ejus malitiam tanquam unicum motivum, 
quia odium malitise vitii necessario fundatur in amore objectivee bonitatis 
virtutis oppositce, illumque necessario supponit. Unde nemo odit malitiara 
alicujus vitii propter se, nisi amet, et quia amat, bonitatem et pulchritudi- 
nem virtutis oppositae. De Act. Hum. cap. iii. art. i. 



400 OUR OWN GOD. 

It also has a propensity to concentrate us upon ourselves, 
and so to hinder charity. Self must come in, when we are 
always looking at self and selPs behavior, and when even 
the Object of faith presents itself habitually to us in the 
light of self ^s rule. In this way it not unfrequently hin- 
ders the more beautiful exercises of charity ; for charity is 
not the doing only our duty to our neighbor. That does 
not take us much beyond justice. The habit of mind of 
mere conscientiousness seems different from the habit of 
mind of exuberant charity. It is not moreover genial to 
high spiritual things, such as voluntary austerities, the love 
of suffering, the practice of the evangelical counsels, the 
sorrow because God is so little loved and so much offended, 
and the willing renunciation of spiritual consolations and 
sensible sweetnesses. A merely conscientious man may be 
intellectually convinced that he ought to aim at perfection, 
but the chances are immensely against his succeeding; 
and for this reason, that he has not sufficient momentum. 
His impulse dies out, and he stops short of the aim. Doing 
what is right because it is right is not a sufficiently perfect 
or robust motive to carry a man all the way to perfection. 
Love alone can do that. It sounds almost like an absurdity 
to talk of observing the counsels from a sense of duty, or 
of aiming at a more perfect interior observance of the pre- 
cepts than it is our duty to aim at, because we have deter- 
mined to make a duty of it. 

This principle, too, although it is thoroughly Christian, 
and leans on Christ, appears to have but a weak tendency 
to produce that nameless indescribable likeness to Christ, 
which is the characteristic of the saints. It has not enough 
of self-oblivion in it, and is very deficient in its sympathies 
with the mystical operations of grace. Moreover it has not 
the same blessings as love ; not that it is not an ordinance of 
God, and one which no one can with safety forget or depre- 
ciate ; but there is an air about it of the Old Testament 



OUR OWN GOD. 401 

rather than the New. It likewise keeps men back by lead- 
ing to scruples. It never lets conscience alone. It wastes 
in a fruitless post-mortem examination of its actions the 
time that might have been spent in acts of heroic contrition 
or of disinterested love. Nay, it will even disinter again 
and again those actions, which have already passed the 
ordeal of so many examinations, and it will dissect, and 
meddle, until it has acquired an inveterate habit of stoop- 
ing, and contracted a disease of the eyes. This is its im- 
moderation, the excess to which it tends, and to which it 
must tend with all the more determination the higher it 
rises in the spiritual life, where common rules are less clear 
in their application, and the processes of grace more intri- 
cate and unusual. Yet while it breeds scruples, this same 
principle also ministers to self-trust, because of its habit of 
examining actions for itself, and then of going by what it 
gees. It is very rare to find a man, who habitually does 
what is right only because it is right, who is not at the 
same time quietly self-opinionated, and dangerously free 
from all distrust of his own decisions. 

Then again there seems in such a principle of action no 
real rehearsing for heaven. The Blessed in heaven do not 
act from a sense of duty. They contemplate and love. 
Surely there must have been some habit formed on earth, 
to correspond to and anticipate that celestial habit of keep- 
ing the gaze fixed on the beautiful object of faith. A con- 
scientious seraph is a very difi&cult idea to realize. In truth 
there is nothing supernatural about this principle, except 
the amount of love which it contains. It borrows from love 
all about it that is worth much, and yet keeps love in the 
lowest place, as if it was a dependent and inferior. Thus 
we are not surprised to find those, who habitually act upon 
it, somewhat out of harmony with the lives of the saints, 
with new miracles, with popular devotions, with appari- 
tions, pilgrimages, taking vows, and other supernatural 
20 2i2 



402 OUR OWN GOD. 

things. For the principle does not take kindly to the 
supernatural, grasps it nervously, and so is perpetually 
letting it slip because it cannot hold it. 

Neither is it an attractive principle to others. It deprives 
goodness of much of its missionary character and convert- 
ing influences. It does not draw people round it, or make 
sinners wonder enviously at the sweetness of Christian 
sanctity. It is dry. It repels. It speaks shortly, and 
makes no allowances. It is unseasonable, and is proud of 
disregarding circumstances. Time and place are out of 
time and place to it. It has a propensity to preach, and 
dictate, and be tiresome. And in all these respects it plays 
into the hands of the natural foibles of those to whose 
character this principle is most likely to commend itself. 
Then, which sounds a privilege but is in truth a disability, 
it is a rarer gift than love. It is often a growth of natural 
character, whereas God pours love out on every one. It 
thus embraces fewer souls : because fewer are capable of 
walking by it. It is love, and walking by love, that swells 
the grand multitude of the number who are saved. Con- 
scientiousness could never fill heaven half so fast as love. 
So that it neither manufactures the high saints, nor yet 
throngs with happy crowds the outer courts of heaven. 

It is also less directly connected with the gift of final per- 
severance than love. As was said, it is a life of efi'orts, and 
it is the nature of efi'orts to be complete in themselves, and 
not enchained one with another ; and the doctrine of habit 
is a poor thing to trust to in the supernatural afiairs of 
grace. God Himself acts from love, that is, from con- 
formity to Himself, and not from a sense of duty.* God's 

* In Deo operationes moraliter bonas, honestae, ac laudabiles dicuntur quae 
sunt conformes fini ipsius Dei, ut est amor suimet. And again, Dens, quia 
non habet finem ultimum a se distinctum, quando operatur honeste, hoc est 
conformiter ad proprium finem, et juxta exigentiam, quam habet a propria 
natura, non obligatur rigorose a regula honestatis, ped physice, imo et metar 
pbysice, necessitatur a Seipso. Viva, p. ii. disp. vii. q. i. de prima regula 
moralitatis. 



OUR OWN GOD. 403 

life is love; and thus love has the blessing of exuberance, 
of fruitfulness, of speed. It is venturesome, overflowing, 
divine. 

All that is good about the other principle is liable to con- 
stant error from a want of moderation ; and in pointing out 
the reasons for preferring the principle of love to the prin- 
ciple of duty, as an habitual motive-power in the spiritual 
life, it has been necessary to touch upon some of the exag- 
gerations to which the exclusive principle of duty may lead, 
but does not necessarily lead. This must not be misunder- 
stood. The principle of duty is holy and strong. The 
principle of love disjoined from the principle of duty is a 
thing which will save no man. Doing right because it is 
right is a course which every one ought to pursue, a habit 
which all should cultivate. All that we have been arguing 
for is, that the spiritual man who looks at love primarily 
and prominently, and at duty secondarily and subordi- 
nately, will sooner be a thoroughly converted man, or a 
saint, or a higher kind of saint, than the spiritual man who 
reverses the process, and looks at duty primarily and pro- 
minently, as the solid part of his devotion, and love second- 
arily and subordinately, as the sweetening of his duty. 

Personal love of God ! this then is the conclusion of the 
whole. To love God because He desires our love, to love 
Him because He first loved us, to love Him because He 
loves us with such a surpassing love, to love our Creator 
because He redeemed us and our Eedeemer because He 
created us, to love Him as our Creator in all the orders of 
nature, grace, and glory, and finally to love Him for His 
own sake because of His infinite perfections, because He is 
what He is, — this, and this alone is religion ; this is what 
flows from the ties between the Creator and His redeemed 
creature ; for what is redemption but the restoring, repair- i 
ing, and ennobling of creation? To love our Creator as 
our First Cause, as our Last End, and as our Abiding Pos- 



404 OUR OWN GOD. 

session, — this is the whole matter. He in His mercy has 
made the love of Him a precept, and therefore those who 
do right because it is right really love Him, and go to Him 
at last, as well as those who only love Him or chiefly love 
Him out of love. But this last way is the most easy for 
ourselves, and the most honorable for Him. This is why 
I said at the outset that the beginning of the whole process 
was rather in God^s touching and mysterious desire for our 
love than in His love of us. That desire of His seems the 
handle by which loving souls take hold of their religion, 
and in which they find the key to their own position of crea- 
tures, and to the rights and attractions of the Creator; and 
this desire of God for our love leads straight to our desire 
for Him, our desire not so much for His love as for Him- 
self, that gift of Himself, which, though inseparable from 
His love, is yet much more than love, more precious, and 
more tender. 

What then is life, but the possession of God, and the 
beauty of God drawing us ever more and more powerfully 
to the fuller possession of Him, until at length in heaven 
we come to the fulness of our possession ? Let us emanci- 
pate ourselves for a while from earthly thoughts, and look 
up to heaven, while the angels, who rejoice over one sinner 
that does penance, are keeping the feast of All Saints. 
That day might be called the Feast of the Magnificence 
of Jesus ; for the spirit of the feast is a spirit of magnifi- 
cence ; it is the feast of the heavenly court of the great 
King of our salvation. Yet what is the sight which we 
behold there? Ah! if we look into heaven, we shall learn 
much about creation ! Let us put aside, not in forgetful- 
ness, still less for lack of burning love, the empire of the 
angels, our elder brothers, and look only at the human 
family which is there. Around the altar of the Lamb, by 
Mary^s maternal throne, there are various rings and choirs 
and glorious hierarchies of the saints. They lie bathed in 



OUR OWN GOD. 405 

splendor, beautiful to look upon, but it is a splendor which 
is not their own. Each soul is beautified with an infinite 
variety of graces, the particular combination of which is 
distinctive of that particular soul, and is a separate orna- 
ment of heaven, so that not one saint could be spared 
without heaven missing a portion of its beauty. Yet those 
graces are not their own. They were gifts to begin with, 
and they must remain gifts to the end. Their exceeding 
joy is such a vision of delight that we could not see it now, 
and live. In truth there is not one of their gifts, not the 
least and lowest of their rewards, but they might well joy 
in it with a surpassing joy. But it is not so. Their joy 
is not in their own beauty, or their own perfections, or 
their bright rewards. It is entirely in something which is 
not their own. It is the beauty of Jesus which is their 
magnificence and joy. And the eternity of their joy de- 
pends, not in any inward impossibility of their own to fall 
away, but in the ceaseless attraction of that unfading 
beauty. look at the tranquillity of that vast scene, out- 
spread before our eyes 1 It is creation in its Father^s house, 
creation in its home of glory. Its wanderings are over, its 
problems solved, its consummation gloriously accomplished. 
Yet the completion and elevation of its nature, the expan- 
sion and coronation of its graces, and no less also the 
actual exuberant and joyous life of its eternal glory, is not 
in itself, but in its possession of the Creator. It has left 
itself, and taken up with something else, and so it is per- 
fect, complete, at home, at rest ; for that something else is 
God, its all in all, its own God. 

But let us look back again to earth, into the ages past, 
and see the processes by which God made His saints, by 
which He drew all these multitudinous rings and choirs 
and hierarchies of the saints, out of the thick of the world 
into His Bosom, where just now we saw them lying. The 
same beauty, which, seen, is their eternal life, unseen and 



406 OUR OWN GOD. 

believed in, drew them over earth to heaven. The ways 
were many, the ways were strange, the ways were unlike 
each other, but this was the one invariable process. It was 
not a mere sense of duty, nor a grand conscientiousness, 
however bright and strong, which carried them heroically 
through opposing obstacles, right up to the highest seats 
in heaven. It was a secret attraction, a drawing at their 
hearts, a current sucking them in, at first faint and feeble, 
slow and uncertain, then steadier, and now swifter, and at 
last turbulent, and then suddenly they were drawn under 
and engulfed for ever in the beautiful vision of their Cre- 
ator. It is the characteristic of God's greatest operations 
on earth to be invisible. So is it for the most part with 
His process of making saints. When it does come to view, 
it is so unlike what we should have expected that it scan- 
dalizes us by its strangeness. Can we point to the life of 
any one saint, at whom people did not take scandal while 
he was being sanctified ? Why do we not remember more 
continually this fact, and the lesson it teaches us ? When 
men saw Jesus too near and too openly, they judged Him 
worthy of death. So it is with ourselves. When His 
shadow crosses us in a saint, we judge him to be anything 
rather than a saint, and worthy of condemnation. 

The immense variety of ways in which the saints are 
drawn to God is greatly to be noted. Climate, rank, date 
in the world*s history, sufierings, circumstances, education, 
vocation, national character, all these have had so much 
to do with it, and yet so little. They account for much, 
yet not for all, and for the main thing not in the least ; for 
the same things, which look to be helping saints forward, 
are visibly keeping other souls back. There is plainly a 
secret spell at work, a spell on the world, on life, on sor- 
row, on darkness, on trial, and even on sin. It is working 
in them. It is strengthening itself in difi'erent souls by 
contradictory circumstances. But it is a spell, nothing 



OUR OWN GOD. 407 

else than a spell. It is none other than the beauty of 
Jesus, which is the life and light of heaven. Heaven is 
heaven, because God is so beautiful in the light ; and earth 
is the factory of saints, because God is so beautiful in the 
darkness. 

See how the spell acts, even against the huge, almost 
resistless, power of the world. Who are they whom it 
affects ? Ah ! look at them, lying on God's breast, gleam- 
ing there, bright trophies of redeeming grace. They are 
young, delicate, highborn virgins, in the fires, under the 
pincers, among the teeth of lions, boy and girl martyrs, 
like Venantius, Agatha, Agnes, Lucy, Catherine, and 
Cecilia. They are children, saints in childhood, whose 
reason was anticipated that they might love Jesus ; they 
were little things who tore their flesh with scourges, who 
prayed hours at a time, who had ecstasies and worked 
miracles, who had mysterious sufferings, and lived in a 
mystical world, and were incomprehensibly like Jesus. 
They were kings and queens, who put away their crowns, 
took up the cross, and oared their feet, and went off after 
God. They were gallant soldiers, like St. Ignatius, or 
lawyers like St. Alphonso. They were freshly converted 
sinners, with all their habits of sin still strong upon them. 
Or they were ordinarily good men in the world who loved 
permitted liberty and blameless pleasure, but over whom 
by degrees a sort of dream seemed to pass, and noiselessly 
they were led out of the crowd dreaming of the beautiful 
God, and there was a cold touch of death, and they woke 
up, and found it more than true. 

These were the persons on whom the spell worked. Now 
see from what it drew them. There were first of all the 
exquisite sinless pleasures of all the senses. And the saints 
are so far from being insensible persons, that none can rival 
them in the keen susceptibilities of pleasure, or in the re- 
fined vivacity of their sensitiveness. It is this which enables 



408 OUR OWN GOD. 

them to suffer so acutely, as if they had first been flayed 
alive and then bid to walk through the thorny world. 
There was the external beauty of the earth, in which they 
could read more plainly than other men the sweet enticing 
loveliness of God^s perfections. There were the ties of the 
most holy and tender love. Children deserted their parents, 
who loved those parents with such a love as common chil- 
dren do not know. There were mothers walking into con- 
vents over the bodies of their sons. There were mothers 
watching their sons writhing in the excruciating agonies 
of a ferocious martyrdom, and encouraging them with tear- 
less eyes to suffer more and more. There were fond hus- 
bands and doting wives parting of their own accord for all 
the term of life, and the cloister-door closing upon well- 
known faces as if it had been the hard cold slab of the very 
tomb. There were joys from which the saints voluntarily 
turned in order that they might indulge in sorrow, and so 
catch just a little look of Christ. And under their sorrows, 
when heaven rained crosses on their heads, and earth burned 
their feet as they walked, 0, then was the magic of the 
potent spell ! with what elasticity they rose up under their 
load, and how they sang, like angels, as they went ! And 
it was liberty which they all gave up, the liberty out of 
which God gets all His creature^s love, the liberty which, 
alas ! refuses him so much I They gave up their liberty 
for the sweet captivity of personal love of God ; but it was 
the free surrender of their liberty which made it beautiful 
to God^s eye, and sweetness to His taste, and music in His 
ear. What a spell to have drawn such myriads of souls 
from such attractions, what power, what pleading, what 
persuasiveness, what versatility, and yet withal tranquil as 
the beautiful God Himself! 

All these wonders are done by the beauty of God acting 
on the soul. In heaven it is more intelligible ; for there 
the blessed Vision is eternal, unchanging, and in the full 
blaze of glory. But the strange and touching thing is, 
that on earth it is the merest glimpses of God which work 
all these wonders. A chance text of scripture falls upon 
the ear, in church or out of it, and a touch of power comes 
with it, and with the power a flash of light, and a saint is 
made. There are brief sweetnesses in prayer, which come 
now and then in life, like shooting moonbeams through 
rents on close-packed cloudy nights. They lit up the cross 
upon the steeple and were gone. But the soul fed on them 



OUR OWN GOD. 409 

for daj^s. There are the first moments after communion, 
an unearthly time, when we are like Mary, carrying the 
Lord of heaven and earth within her, and we feel Him, and 
have so much to sa}^ that we do not speak at all ; and the 
time passes, and we seem to have missed an opportunity. 
But the work was done, and a supernatural health is 
dancing in our blood, and straightway we climb a mountain 
on the road to heaven. Then there are sudden gushes of 
love, and along with the love, light also ; and we know not 
why they come nor whence. Heaven is all quiet above us, 
and makes no sign. Circumstances are going on around 
us in the old tame, languid way. What can it be? Cer- 
tainly it came from within, as if a depth of the soul had 
broken up, and flooded the surface ; and we remember that, 
within us, in one of those depths, in which perhaps we 
have never been ourselv^, and till eternity dawns never 
shall be, God deigns to dwell, and now we understand the 
secret. Then there are momentary unions with Him in 
times of sorrow, which were so swift that they looked like 
possibilities rather than actual visitations. But they were 
true embraces from our Heavenly Father, and they have 
healed us of diseases, and they have infused a new strength 
into us, and they were so close that we have been tingling 
ever since, and feel the pressure at this moment still. Then 
there were flashes from the monstrance, which showed us 
we know not what and told us we know not what. Only 
they made the darkness of the world very thick and pal- 
pable, like lightning on a moonless night. But they did a 
work ; for we felt ourselves laid hold of in the solid dark- 
ness which followed the sudden light, and hurried on over 
stocks and stones and up high places, and then we were 
left, lonely, but behold 1 so much nearer than we had ever 
seen it before, a pale streak, which was the dawning of the 
heavenly day. Nay, one sight of God's beauty at death, 
such a sight as the dying have sometimes, and which we 
cannot explain, is enough in the way of sanctity to do all 
life's work in one short hour. ! then, if God be all this 
in time, what must eternity be like? 0, happy, happy 
saints 1 for a while longer you shall be in His beautiful 
light, and we be far, far away : for a while — yet but for a 
Avhile, and then we also shall be with you, with the same 
glad light of that Divine Face shining full upon our ran- 
somed souls ! 

Meanwhile, even upon earth God is our possession, and 
2 K 



410 OUR OWN GOD. 

we are entering upon our inheritance by degrees. Jesus 
is the Creator chid in the garments of redeeming love, and 
we have Him here on earth already all our own, while we 
are sadly but sweetly striving to be all for Him. Already 
the attributes of the Creator are fountains of joy and sal- 
vation to the creature. AVhy do we not gaze upon them 
more intently? There is no earthly science which can 
compete in interest with the science of God. It is a know- 
ledge which quickly leads to love, and love, is at once con- 
version, perseverance, and salvation. The divine perfections 
support us by their contrast with what we see on earth. 
The}^ relieve our minds. They increase our trust. They 
actually out of their own abundance supply our deficiencies. 
They feed our souls by their grandeur, and exercise an 
awful mysterious attraction upon us, drawing us towards 
themselves, yea, into themselve^. They affect our souls 
variously and medicinally. Justice gives us the gift of 
fear, while mercy emboldens us to the grace of familiarity. 
Omnipotence is what our weakness wants, and omnipre- 
sence what our discouragement requires. Our ignorance 
consoles itself in omniscience, and our fears lean and rest 
themselves on providence. And all our wants and all our 
weaknesses and all our w^rongnesses carry their manifold 
burdens to God^s fidelity, full certain that they will be 
lightened there. All these perfections are deeps, into w^hich 
we are ever descending now with most surpassing content- 
ment both of mind and will, and in which we shall be 
ever sinking, delightfully deeper through all eternity. 
They satisfy us, and they delight by satisfying ; and again 
they do not satisfy, and by not satisfying, they delight 
still more, because of the delightful hunger which they 
leave behind, and which is in itself a marvellous, insatiable 
contentment. They are a rest, and out of them there is no 
rest, they are a home, and short of them, all is wandering 
and banishment. They are our own. They belong to us. 
The Creator has made them all over to us to be our posses- 
sion and our joy, as if He kept them Himself only to bear 
the weight of them, so that to us they might be nothing 
else but joys. '^ Even His eternity is ours; and though we 

* Nieremberg in the eighth chapter of the seventh book of his Prodigy of 
Divine love, Avhile dwelling on the way in which God vouchsafes to put His 
attributes at our disposal, uses language which might seem nearly to fall 
under the condemnation passed by Innocent XI. in 1679, twenty-one years 
after Nieremberg's death, on the theses De omnipotentia donata. But it 
must be remembered that those propositions had nothing whatever to do 



OUR OWN GOD. '411 

are but sons of time, yet, possessing God, we enjoy in Him 
eternity, and our religious minds even now, much more 
our glorified spirits hereafter, run forth up the backward 
ages and again down the countless ages yet untold, and 
ever lose themselves, and ever find themselves, in that 
ocean of everlasting life. there is no devotion like de- 
votion to the attributes of God ! blessed, beautiful in- 
heritance of the creature ! They are eternal, and will 
never fail us, immutable and will never change, immense 
and always leave us room. space 1 thou must widen thy 
gigantic shadowy limits, else wilt thou be a very prison for 
our immortal joys ! 

If earth be such a heaven to believing souls, what sort 
of heaven must the real heaven be ? What is that incom- 
parable beauty which the Blessed are gazing on this very 
hour? We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it. 
What is it that that beauty is doing to their capacious, 
serene, and glory-strengthened souls ? We have no words 
to tell, no thoughts to think it. What is that divine 
torrent of love which bursts forth from it, and threatens to 
submerge and overwhelm their separate created lives ? 
We have no words to tell, no thoughts to think it. Whither 
reaches that white glistening eternity through which it will 
endure, and which seems to brighten in the far-off prospect 
rather than to fade away — whither does it reach ? We have 
no words to tell, no thoughts to think it. 

Look how the Splendors of the Divine Nature gleam far 
and wide, nay infinitely, while the trumpets of heaven 
blow, and the loud acclaims of the untiring creatures 
greet with jubilant amazement the Living Vision ! See how 
Eternity and Immensity entwine their arms in inexplicable 
embrace, the one filling all space, the other outliving all 
time : the one without quantity or limit, the other without 
beginning, end, or duration. See how Mercy and Justice 
mingle with and magnify each other, how they put on 

with God's being the last end and enjoyment of men. They concerned the 
concurrence of His omnipotence to our actions, and our free use of that con- 
currence in sinning, and they implied the conclusion that God's dominion 
over His free creatures was imperfect because of their freedom. These pro- 
positions were condemned as - at the least temerarious and novel." Tiva 
has a short commentary on them. (Opera Omnia, torn. vii. p. 194. Ferrara 
edition, IToT.) They are also given by Philippus de Carboneano, the friend 
of Benedict XIV.. in his treatise on condemned propositions, but he does not 
name their author: nor does Denzinger in his Enchiridion; aiid Bernino 
dots not give them at all among the propositions of Innocent XI., perhaps 
because they were not condemned as " heretical." 



412 OUR OWN GOD. 

each other^s look, and fill each other's ofBces. Behold the 
Understanding and the AVill, the one for ever lighting up 
with such meridian glory the profound abysses of God's 
uncircumscribed Truth and illimitable Wisdom ; the other 
enfolding for ever in its unconsuming fires the incompre- 
hensible Life of God, His infinite oceanlike expanse of 
being, and every creature of the countless vrorlds that from 
His life dravr their ovrn. Look at the divine Immutability 
and Liberty, hovr they sit together like sisters, deep en- 
throned in that marvellous life, and how God is free 
because He is immutable, and immutable because He is so 
free. See how the Son and the Holy Ghost know all the 
Father's knowledge, and yet He alone by His understanding 
produces that coeternal Word who is His son. See how 
the Holy Ghost has all the love both of the Father and the 
Son ; and yet They alone by Their will produced that 
blessed Limit of Themselves, that uncreated Sigh, that 
sacred Jubilee of Theirs, that everlasting Bond of union, 
who is the Holy Ghost. And thus is the loving light of 
the divine understanding ever on fire with Love ; and thus 
is the living love of the divine will ever gleaming with the 
magnificence of uncreated Light. And all this life, and all 
this assemblage of perfections, and all this royal vision, 
and all this eternal intertwining of uncreated beauties, is 
itself a simple act, and its simplicity and its actuality are 
the crowning beauties of it all. God is. He possesses 
actually all the plenitude of being, without admixture of 
privation, without dilution of possibility ; for not only are 
all things possible in Him, but all possibilities are actual 
to Him. He never yet has been able to be : He never will 
be able to be : He will never be able not to be. He simply 
is. Beginning, end, succession, change — they come not 
nigh Him. They breathe no breath upon Him. He is a 
Pure Act. As St. Gregory Nazianzen says. He is all 
things, and yet He is nothing, because He does not belong 
to things at all. He is, and He is eternally, and He is 
necessarily, and He is of Himself. And it is this Sim- 
plicity, this Actuality, which passes over the Grand Vision 
with incessant soft flashes from end to end, and again from 
end to end, of that endless nature, and which is to the 
Face of God what expression is to the face of man, at once 
its charm and its identity, its beauty and its truth. As we 
know each other by our looks, so we know God by His 
Simplicity. 



OUR OWN GOD. 413 

liappy souls of the Blessed, and what of you? It is 
all written in the Holy Book y^ and it needs no comment- 
ing. On the third day she laid away the garments she 
"wore, and put on her glorious apparel. And glittering in 
royal robes, after she had called upon God, the Ruler and 
Saviour of all, she took two maids with her. And upon 
one of them she leaned, as if, for delicateness and over- 
much tenderness, she were not able to bear up her own 
body. And the other maid followed her lady, bearing up 
her train flowing on the ground. But she with a rosy 
color in her face, and with gracious and bright eyes, hid 
a mind full of exceeding great fear. In going in she 
passed through all the doors in order, and stood before the 
King, where He sat upon His royal throne, clothed with 
His royal robes, and glittering with gold and precious 
stones, and He was terrible to behold. And when He had 
lifted up His countenance, the queen sank down, and her 
color turned pale, and she rested her weary head upon her 
handmaid. And the King^s spirit was changed into mild- 
ness, and all in haste He leaped from His throne, and 
holding her up in His arms till she came to herself, 
caressed her with these words : What is the matter, 
Esther? I^m thy Brother, fear not. Thou shalt not die: 
for this law is not made for thee, but for all others. Come 
near then, and touch the sceptre. And as she held her 
peace, He took the golden sceptre, and laid it upon her 
neck, and kissed her, and said, Wh}^ dost thou not speak 
to Me ? And she answered, I saw Thee, my Lord, as an 
angel of God, and my heart was troubled for fear of Thy 
majesty. For Thou, my Lord, art very admirable, as Thy 
Face is full of graces ! And while she was speaking, she 
fell down again, and was almost in a swoon. But the 
King was troubled, and all His servants comforted her. 

Such is the picture of the Creator and the creature. It 
is a history of the truest love that ever was : nay of the 
only love that was ever truly true. And what is the end 
of all ? We are God's own creatures, and God is our own 
God. All else will fail us, but He never will. All is love 
with Him, love in light and love in darkness, love always 
and everywhere. There are many difficulties left unex- 
plained, many problems yet unsolved. Would it not be 
strange, if it were not so, seeing that He is infinite and we 

* Esther xv. 

2k2 



414 OUR OWN G01>. 

finite, He is Creator and we but creatures? But the diffi- 
culties are only difficulties of love. There is nothing cold in 
them, nothing frightening, nothing which goes one step to- 
wards disproving that sweet truth that He is our own God, 
our very own. There is no difficulty in wondering why we 
are not in heaven already. The wonder and the difficulty 
are, that such as we know ourselves to be should ever enter 
there at all. This is the great difficulty, and it is a difficulty 
for tears. Yet when that difficulty looks up into the face 
of God^s Fidelity, then that sweetest and most soothing of 
all our Creator^s grandeurs wipes the tears from its eyes, 
and hope comes out from behind her cloud, and shines 
softly, and the heart is still. Our own God? And so 
beautiful ! A theologian said that if one lost soul could 
reunite in itself all the rage and hatred of all the lost against 
God, and that it could root, fortify, and confirm, all this 
gigantic rage and hatred in itself for millions and millions 
of years, until it had become a new, ineradicable, and pre- 
ternatural nature to him, one little ray of God's beauty 
falling gently on him for a single moment would change 
his whole being that instant into such respectful love and 
utter adoration, that he would not feel the fires that burned 
him, because of the greater fires of his transported love. 
And we are free, and we are in earth's fair sunshine, and 
our heart is full of a little but most true love of God, and a 
whole world of God's blessed love is resting on our single 
heart, — and shall we doubt, shall we hesitate, shall we 
tremble, shall we be chilled in the midst of all these fires 
of love ? my Creator, my Eternal Love ! my Father, 
my Heavenly Father ! weary yet full of trust, worthless but 
truly loving Thee, on earth still and very far from heaven, 
my home and my rest are still in Thy Fidelity ! In Te, 
Domine ! speravi, non confundar in aeternum ! 



THE END. 



MUEPHY & CO.'S NEW ANNOUNCEMENTS. 



NEW AND UNIFORM EDITIONS OF 

REV. DR. FABER'S WORKS. 

With the sanction and corrections of the Author. 

Will he ready, early in the Fall, uniform with the "Creator and the 
Creature," printed from large type, on fine paper, 

NEW EDITIONS OP 

Growth in Holiness; or, The Progress of Spiritual Life. 
The Blessed Sacrament; or, The Works and Ways of God. 
All for Jesus; or, The Easy Ways of Divine Love. 

Preparing for Early Publication. 
Theologia Dogmatica. By the Most Rev. Francis 

Patrick Kenrick, Archhishop of Baltimore. A new revised edition, in 
3 vols. 8vo. 

Excevpta ex Rituali Romano pro Administratione Sacra- 

mentorum, ad Commodiorem usum Missionariorum, in Septentrionalis 
America3 Foederatai Provinciis. Editio Altera. 

The Visitation llanual, a New Prayer Book, compiled 

hy the Sisters of the Visitation. 

Catholic Hours ; or, The Family Prayer Book. 

>S'^. Ignatius^ Method of Meditation. A Series of Practi- 
cal Meditations, &c. 

The Philosophy of the Catholic Catechism, from the 

French of the Abbe Martinet. 

Ritus et Preces ad Missam Celehrandam in usum prae- 

cipue eorum quis sacris initiantur. 

The Gospel Story Book. Illustrated. 
The Yankee in Ireland. By Paul Peppergrass, Esq. 
MURPHY & CO., Publishers, 182 Baltimore St., Baltimore. 



MURPHY & CO'S REC ENT PUBLICATIONS. 

Tke Roman Vesperal, containing the complete Vespers 

for the whole year, with Gregorian Chants in Modern Notation. Published 
with the Approbation of the Most Rev. Archbishop of Baltimore. Various 
bindings, from 75c. to . . $3 00 

The Genius of Christianity ; or, The Spirit and Beauty 

of the Christian Religion. A new and complete translation from the French, 
with a Biography and Notes. By the Rev. C.I. White, D.D. Third edition, 
embellished with a Portrait of the Author. 8vo., cloth, S2 50 ; cloth, gilt 
edges, §53 50 ; cloth gilt, panelled sides, 5 plates, $4 50 ; turkey morocco or 
antique, S6 00 

Life of Mrs, Eliza A. Seton, Foundress and First Superior 

of the Sisters of Charity in the United States. By the Rev. C. I. White, D.D. 
Embellished with a fine Portrait of Mrs. Seton. 12mo., cloth, §1 25; cloth, 
full gilt, 351 75 

The Primacy of the Apostolic See Vindicated. By the 

Most Rev. F. P. Kenrick, Archbishop of Baltimore. Fifth revised edition, 
embellished with a fine Portrait of his Holiness Pius IX. 8vo., cloth, $1 50 ; 
library style, ' . . $2 00 

The History of England. By John Lin gar d, D.D. A 

new and complete edition, embellished with upwardsof thirty illustrations, 
including a Portrait and Biography of the Author. Crown 8vo., 10 v. bd. 
in 6, SIO 00 ; hf. cf. ex., ' $15 00 

THE people's edition OF LINGARD's ENGLAND. 

LingarcVs History of England, abridged^ with a continu- 
ation from 1688 to 1854, By James Burke, Esq., Barrister-at-Law. With a 
Memoir of Dr. Lingard, and Marginal Notes, by M. J. Kerney, A.M. Embel- 
lished with a fine steel Portrait of Dr. Lingard. 8vo., cloth, $2 00 ; library 
style, $2 50 

Protestantism^ and Catholicity compared in their Effects 

on the Civilization of Europe. By Rev. J. Balmes. With a Biography of 
the Author. 8vo., cloth, $2 00 ; library style, $2 60 

The Catholic Pidpit, containing a Sermon for every 

Sunday and Holiday in the year, and Good Friday, with several Occa- 
sional Discourses. 8vo, cloth, '^2 25 ; library style, . . . . $2 50 

Tales and Romances of Hendrik Conscience^ the cele- 
brated Belgian novelist. In 6 vols, demi 8vo., embellished with neat 
Frontispiece and Tignette Title Pages ; cl. 75c. ; cl.gt. edges, . . SI 00 
I. The Curse of theVillage ; the Happiness of Being Rich ; and Blind Rosa. 
II. The Lion of Flanders: or, the Battle of the Golden Spurs. 

III. Count Hugo of Craenhove ; Wooden Clara; and the Village Inn-keeper. 

IV. Veva ; or the War of the Peasants ; and the Conscript. 
V. The Miser ; Ricketicketack ; and the Poor Gentleman. 

VI. The Demon of Gold. This is his last, and judges have pronounced 
it his best production. 

Pauline Seward. A new revised and illustrated edition of 

this popular novel. 2 vols, in one. 12mo., cloth, $1 25; cloth, full gilt, SI 75 

Lady Fullerton^s Tales. Uniform, at 75c. per vol. 

Lady Bird. Grantly Manor. Ellen Middleton. 

A New Series of Tales for Youth. Neat, cheap, and 

attractive volumes, intended for premiums for Sunday and Parochial 
Schools, &c. 

MURPHY & CO., Publishers, 182 Baltimore St., Baltimore. 



V/i. 



%k 



1029 m'mK 



